My friend Jimy inspired my earlier essay, Socialism Is Communism Lite, with his original seven reasons to vote Republican. Now he's back with eight. This time, I'm taking his arguments through nearly a century of American history, comparing what Democrat politicians promised with what taxpayers actually received. From the New Deal to California's $35 billion railway, there's plenty of history to examine.

In 2008, California voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds to help finance a high-speed railway connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. The trains were supposed to travel between the two metropolitan areas in less than three hours, giving Californians an alternative to driving or flying.

Eighteen years later, Californians are still waiting for their first ride. By the summer of 2026, billions had been spent acquiring property, constructing bridges, building elevated guideways, and preparing the Central Valley corridor. Yet the project still had no completed operational high-speed railway track.

Apparently, building a railroad and building something a train can run on are two separate government programs.

The original estimated cost for the first phase was approximately $33 billion. California’s 2026 planning documents now put the broader San Francisco-to-Los Angeles first phase at roughly $126 billion. Meanwhile, the state hopes to begin passenger service between Merced and Bakersfield in 2033, at an estimated capital cost of nearly $35 billion.

If you’ve spent much time in California, you’ll appreciate the irony.

Before joining the Army, I worked for a company that printed a magazine we had to deliver to Anaheim every month. Overnight shipping was too expensive, and our production deadlines were too tight, so my boss paid me to drive the magazines down from the Bay Area. He covered my time and hotel, and being young, I thought it was a pretty good arrangement.

The obvious route was Interstate 5. Unfortunately, that meant driving through California’s Central Valley, where cattle, agriculture, petroleum production, and stagnant air sometimes combined to create an absolutely magnificent stench. And I-5 doesn’t even run through Bakersfield. It passes miles west of the city, but you could still smell it.

I eventually started taking Highway 101 instead. It added considerable time to the trip, but at least I could roll down the windows without regretting it. So when California announced that its initial high-speed railway would connect Merced and Bakersfield, I had to laugh. I used to drive extra hours to avoid that part of California. Now taxpayers are financing a $35 billion railway that won’t initially reach San Francisco or Los Angeles.

The state envisions the Central Valley segment as the foundation of a larger network. But according to its own 2026 business plan, the initial line is projected to generate enough ticket revenue and related income to cover only 35 to 49 percent of its annual operating expenses. Taxpayers will finance construction, subsidize operations, and hope that someday the trains reach the cities the original project was supposed to connect.

And somehow, the story gets worse.

In September 2026, California’s high-speed rail inspector general released an investigation into travel expenses billed by consultants working on the project. The authority had reimbursed more than $2 million in travel costs for four consulting firms during the period examined. Investigators reviewed approximately $1.15 million and identified hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses that lacked required approvals or appeared to violate reimbursement rules, with some categories overlapping.

The expenses included premium airline travel, unauthorized international trips, luxury transportation, and rideshare charges to destinations including a nightclub, cigar lounge, and escape room.

These weren’t accusations invented by political opponents. They came from the project’s own inspector general.

After eighteen years, California has an unfinished railway, an initial route dramatically smaller than the one voters were promised, billions in expenditures, projected operating losses, and documented failures in consultant expense oversight.

The contractors have been getting paid. The consultants have been getting paid. The administrative machinery continues operating.

The passengers are still waiting.

Jimy doesn’t spend much time worrying about whether his opinions will make people feel uncomfortable. He looks at the country’s problems, examines the differences between the parties, and tells people what he thinks. I appreciate that.

This time, I want to examine something running through nearly all eight of his arguments. For generations, politicians have promised Americans a better future while continually expanding the government’s responsibilities, authority, and cost. The spending is easy enough to document. Determining what Americans received requires considerably more work.

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A Century of Promises

In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt entered the White House during the Great Depression and launched the New Deal, one of the largest expansions of federal economic intervention in American history.

Washington established employment programs, agricultural subsidies, banking regulations, industrial planning initiatives, and an assortment of new federal agencies. Roosevelt promised economic recovery, but when he took office, unemployment was approximately 25 percent. Six years later, in 1939, it remained around 17 percent under conventional historical estimates.

There is also serious economic research suggesting that some of Roosevelt’s policies actually prolonged the Depression.

In a 2004 study published in the Journal of Political Economy, economists Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian examined New Deal policies that restricted competition and encouraged higher wages through industry-wide arrangements.

Roosevelt’s administration believed that raising wages and prices would restore purchasing power and stimulate economic activity. But maintaining wages above competitive levels while allowing businesses to restrict competition could discourage hiring additional workers and expanding production. Cole and Ohanian’s economic model identified these policies as an important reason the recovery remained so weak.

Washington was attempting to revive the economy while interfering with some of the market adjustments that might have helped businesses recover. The New Deal provided work and financial relief to millions of Americans, but providing temporary assistance and restoring a productive economy are different objectives.

One result of the New Deal was the permanent expansion of federal authority. Programs created during an economic emergency developed their own constituencies, employees, budgets, and political defenders. Even after the original crisis passed, many of the institutions remained.

Nearly half a century later, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation establishing the modern Cabinet-level Department of Education, which began operating in 1980. Its mission included improving educational opportunity, coordinating federal programs, and promoting academic achievement.

Forty-four years later, the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that 40 percent of American fourth graders scored below its Basic benchmark in reading. Only 31 percent reached NAEP Proficient or higher.

America has spent decades administering federal education programs, collecting statistics, imposing requirements, and distributing money to states and school districts. Millions of children still struggle with fundamental reading skills.

State and local governments remain principally responsible for operating schools, but Washington has had decades to demonstrate what its additional layer of administration contributes. The appropriate measurements are student achievement, educational opportunity, and the results of particular federal programs, not the size of the department’s budget.

Politicians regularly announce increases in education spending as though the expenditures themselves constitute an achievement. Parents might prefer hearing how much more their children are learning.

The Civil Rights Record

The Democrat Party’s modern reputation as the champion of civil rights becomes considerably more complicated when examined against its legislative history.

In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower signed the first major federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Another followed in 1960. When Congress considered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Southern Democrats launched a prolonged Senate filibuster to prevent its passage.

One of those senators was West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan member who spoke against the legislation for fourteen hours and thirteen minutes. Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen helped assemble the coalition that finally defeated the filibuster.

On June 10, 1964, the Senate voted 71 to 29 to end debate. Twenty-seven of the Senate’s thirty-three Republicans supported cloture, approximately 82 percent. Forty-four of sixty-seven Democrats voted the same way, approximately 66 percent.

President Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation on July 2 after substantial efforts by civil rights activists, congressional leaders, and supporters in both parties. The legislation was a landmark achievement, but its passage required overcoming years of resistance from powerful Southern Democrats who had defended segregation and obstructed federal civil rights protections.

Republican votes were indispensable to breaking that opposition.

Political reputations can change much faster than historical records. Johnson’s signature appears on the Civil Rights Act, and he deserves recognition for his role in securing its passage. The congressional record also preserves the names and votes of the politicians who tried to prevent it.

The people who endured segregation didn’t have the luxury of treating that resistance as an interesting episode in political history. They lived with its consequences.

The Business of Government Spending

Jimy is especially concerned about government fraud, waste, and the enormous sums flowing through public programs. One part of that system deserves closer scrutiny: the relationship between government agencies, nonprofit organizations, contractors, political influence, and financial accountability.

Most Americans hear nonprofit and picture an organization helping sick children, feeding hungry families, or providing assistance to people in difficult circumstances. Many do exactly that. But nonprofit status is a legal and financial designation, not a guarantee of competent management, effective programs, or political independence.

Federal and state governments distribute substantial sums through grants and contracts to outside organizations. Those organizations employ administrators, consultants, and subcontractors, and some engage in political advocacy involving the programs they administer.

The financial incentives can become remarkably different from those of the taxpayers.

A taxpayer funding a homeless-services program presumably wants fewer people living on the streets. An organization administering that program needs continuing revenue to pay its employees, maintain its operations, and fulfill its contracts. Its survival may depend on continued appropriations even when the underlying problem persists.

That doesn’t establish that the organization wants homelessness to continue. It does establish that the financial interests of program administrators are not necessarily identical to the interests of the people financing the program or receiving its services.

The distinction becomes more consequential when government agencies use the amount spent, the number of people served, or the number of participating organizations as their principal measures of success.

An agency can report that it distributed another hundred million dollars without establishing that the problem became smaller. Contractors can satisfy their agreements, employees can receive their salaries, and politicians can announce additional funding while the public sees little improvement.

Federal grant rules restrict using public grant funds for partisan campaigns. Yet political influence, ineffective oversight, and conflicts of interest can develop even when no criminal law has been broken. Once a government program supports an extensive network of organizations and employees, terminating it can threaten the livelihoods of people whose interests are far more concentrated than those of individual taxpayers.

California’s railway provides a revealing example. Years after voters approved the project, investigators were reviewing consultant expenses for premium travel and entertainment destinations while the promised passenger service remained undelivered.

The inspector general’s findings establish failures in spending controls, not the theft of the entire project budget. Those failures also demonstrate why public contracts should receive independent scrutiny before additional funds are committed.

Taxpayers shouldn’t have to conduct an archaeological expedition through government accounting records to discover what happened to their money.

The Border Didn’t Move

Immigration provides one of the clearest recent comparisons between different federal policies.

During Biden’s presidency, the United States experienced exceptionally high levels of border encounters and apprehensions. Communities struggled with shelter costs, immigration processing, transportation, and demands on public services.

Americans repeatedly heard explanations about why securing the border required new legislation, additional funding, and more international cooperation. Then the administration changed, and the numbers changed with it.

On October 16, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced preliminary fiscal-year figures showing that southwest border apprehensions had fallen approximately 95 percent compared with the Biden administration’s annual average. Border Patrol recorded 98,708 apprehensions during fiscal year 2026, compared with more than 1.8 million annually under Biden.

DHS also reported an entire fiscal year without Border Patrol releasing apprehended migrants into the country at the border.

The border didn’t move. Mexico didn’t disappear. America’s economic opportunities didn’t become less attractive. Federal enforcement and processing policies changed, and apprehensions fell dramatically.

Those numbers demonstrate a substantial change in border enforcement outcomes. They also invite a question about what officials in the previous administration could have accomplished under different policies.

Immigration has consequences extending beyond enforcement. Immigrant communities can become influential political constituencies, advocacy organizations organize around immigration policy, naturalized citizens acquire voting rights, and population counts affect congressional representation.

Those political incentives are worth examining alongside the economic consequences of immigration. Rapid population growth places demands on schools, housing, hospitals, transportation, and local budgets. Communities need time and resources to expand their capacity, regardless of whether newcomers arrived through authorized or unauthorized channels.

Legal immigrants have an interest in consistent enforcement as well. People who follow America’s established procedures reasonably expect those rules to have meaning. Jimy’s concern is that government should administer immigration law consistently rather than continually ask communities to absorb the consequences of inadequate enforcement.

The latest border figures give voters a substantial difference in policy outcomes to examine.

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Wealth Has to Be Created Before It Can Be Spent

Jimy’s discussion of affordability concerns something Americans encounter every day: what their earnings can actually buy.

During Biden’s presidency, annual inflation reached 9.1 percent in June 2022, its highest reading in four decades. Food, housing, insurance, transportation, and other necessities became substantially more expensive. A worker can receive a raise and still lose purchasing power when prices increase faster than wages.

Politicians celebrate lower inflation as though that means prices have returned to their previous levels. It generally means they’re continuing to rise, just more slowly. Families know the difference whenever they pay their bills.

Jimy emphasizes domestic energy production, private investment, entrepreneurship, and policies that encourage businesses to expand.

Building a factory requires someone to risk capital, acquire property, obtain permits, purchase equipment, hire employees, secure supplies, and find customers willing to buy what the factory produces.

Its success depends on producing something valuable enough to justify those costs. Productivity improvements can make products more affordable, increase output, and support higher compensation over time.

Government policy influences practically every stage of that process.

A regulation may protect workers, consumers, or the environment while also imposing costs on businesses. Larger companies can often spread those costs across thousands of employees and millions of sales. A small competitor may have to absorb a similar compliance burden with a fraction of the resources.

That creates a problem policymakers rarely advertise. Regulations intended to control large corporations can sometimes strengthen their competitive position by making it harder for smaller businesses to survive.

Energy costs create similar effects throughout the economy. Fuel and electricity influence agriculture, manufacturing, freight transportation, heating, and numerous other industries. When energy becomes more expensive, businesses must absorb those costs, reduce other expenses, or pass some of the increase to customers.

Affordable and reliable energy can therefore improve economic conditions far beyond the companies producing it.

The question for tax and regulatory policy is whether it encourages investment, competition, productivity, and rising real incomes. Announced investments and projected benefits are useful starting points, but factories must actually open, businesses must produce, and workers must receive the income before the economic promises become measurable results.

A politician can announce a new factory. Someone still has to build it and persuade customers to buy what it produces.

Elections, Money, and Government Power

In August 2025, Pew Research Center found that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats supported requiring government-issued photo identification to vote. Seven out of ten Democrat voters supported the requirement, an unusually broad level of public agreement on an issue that continues to generate political conflict.

Yet when Congress considered the SAVE America Act in 2026, the dispute involved considerably more than showing a photo ID at the polling place.

The House-passed legislation required documentary proof of American citizenship when registering for federal elections, along with specified identification when casting a ballot. That distinction helps explain why a voter who supports photo ID might still have questions about the legislation.

A driver’s license can establish someone’s identity without necessarily establishing citizenship. A passport or birth certificate may establish citizenship, but not everyone has those documents readily available when registering.

The legislation also included a process for applicants unable to present the specified documents to demonstrate citizenship through other evidence.

Supporters argue that stronger documentary requirements would make eligibility checks more reliable. Opponents raise concerns about the availability of records, implementation, and whether eligible citizens could face additional obstacles.

Minnesota provides another example of the questions surrounding election administration. One registered voter can vouch for the residence of as many as eight people registering on Election Day. The procedure includes affidavits and verification measures, but it raises practical questions about how administrators establish eligibility when someone can register and cast a ballot during the same visit.

Election officials must also maintain registration records as people move, change names, die, or register in different jurisdictions. Outdated records require correction, while allegations of illegal voting require evidence that improper ballots were actually cast.

The public’s broad support for photo ID is established. The legislative disagreement concerns how eligibility should be verified, which documents are sufficient, and what procedures should exist for qualified voters who cannot immediately provide them.

Jimy also raises concerns about central bank digital currencies, commonly called CBDCs.

Most Americans already use digital money through banking applications, electronic deposits, and card payments. A CBDC would represent money issued as a direct liability of the central bank, potentially creating a different relationship between citizens and monetary authorities.

Depending on its design, a CBDC could raise significant questions about transaction privacy and government control over payments. On January 23, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from establishing, issuing, or promoting a CBDC except where required by law. The order also directed agencies to terminate existing development initiatives.

The limits of executive authority were also tested during the COVID-19 pandemic. Government requirements affected employment, education, travel, and business operations, leading to major constitutional and administrative-law disputes.

In January 2022, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s broad OSHA vaccine-or-testing requirement for large employers. The Court concluded that Congress had not clearly authorized the agency to impose such a sweeping workplace requirement.

Authority granted to an agency for one purpose can be invoked for another, and emergency measures can establish precedents that remain relevant long after the original emergency has ended. Americans elect new presidents and members of Congress regularly, but the institutions exercising government authority remain.

National Security Doesn’t End at the Border

Jimy’s eighth argument concerns American military power and the strategic waterways through which enormous quantities of international commerce pass.

His document identifies seven important maritime gateways: the Panama Canal, GIUK Gap, Gibraltar, Danish Straits, Turkish Straits, Strait of Hormuz, and Strait of Malacca.

The Strait of Hormuz provides a particularly useful example because approximately one-quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade normally passes through the narrow waterway connecting the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman.

In May 2026, U.S. Central Command announced Project Freedom, a military operation supporting the restoration of commercial navigation through Hormuz. According to CENTCOM, the mission involved guided-missile destroyers, more than 100 land-based and maritime aircraft, unmanned platforms, and approximately 15,000 service members.

The mission had a specific objective: help commercial vessels navigate a waterway whose disruption threatened international energy and shipping markets.

CENTCOM subsequently reported that American forces had opened a passage through the strait while separately enforcing a blockade involving Iranian ports. American forces were assuming operational risks to restore commercial navigation, not merely announcing another diplomatic initiative.

The distinction between a military objective and its results is important here. Deploying fifteen thousand personnel demonstrates the resources committed. Whether commercial vessels could transit safely and regularly, whether attacks diminished, and whether shipping restrictions were sustained are the measures of what the operation accomplished.

Other maritime gateways present different strategic problems. The Panama Canal shortens voyages between the Atlantic and Pacific. The Strait of Malacca connects major Asian trade routes with the Indian Ocean, while the GIUK Gap remains important for naval movements in the North Atlantic.

Jimy’s map emphasizes American access and influence across these passages. Military access and diplomatic influence are distinct from ownership or exclusive control, but they can still provide substantial strategic advantages.

Maintaining that access requires ships, aircraft, personnel, intelligence, international agreements, and the capacity to operate when waterways are threatened. Those capabilities carry enormous costs, but interruptions to global shipping can impose significant economic costs as well.

For taxpayers, military spending deserves the same scrutiny as other federal expenditures, with the added responsibility of protecting the people placed in harm’s way. The relevant questions concern readiness, the mission assigned, its results, and the resources required to sustain them.

The Promises Were Paid For

Jimy’s eight concerns cover many of government’s central responsibilities: border enforcement, public safety, economic opportunity, election integrity, constitutional rights, financial accountability, and national defense.

Americans have nearly a century of experience against which to examine how those responsibilities have been handled.

The New Deal expanded federal power while economic research identified policies that may have prolonged the Depression. Washington established a Cabinet-level Department of Education, yet millions of children still struggle with basic reading skills.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 became a landmark achievement after a prolonged legislative fight in which Southern Democrats tried to block it and Republican votes helped defeat their opposition.

During Biden’s presidency, inflation reached a four-decade high, leaving families with price increases that slower inflation has not erased. The dramatic decline in southwest border apprehensions during 2026 provides a contrasting example of how substantially enforcement outcomes can change when government policies change.

Debates over election procedures, digital currencies, and emergency mandates concern the safeguards protecting citizens from government authority. National security requires military capabilities that can respond to actual threats rather than merely promising to discourage them.

Campaign speeches can explain what politicians intend to accomplish. Budgets, legislation, court decisions, and economic outcomes reveal considerably more about what happened after they obtained power.

Jimy believes his eight arguments explain why Republican policies offer a different direction. His document invites readers to examine the priorities of the two parties and compare the records of the officials responsible for carrying them out.

Which brings me back to California.

In 2008, voters authorized billions to help build a railway connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. Eighteen years later, the state is preparing a much shorter initial route, with projected revenues insufficient to cover its operating expenses.

Consultants have been reimbursed for premium travel, including expenses that violated state rules. Investigators have documented oversight failures, and taxpayers face an extraordinary increase in the projected cost of delivering the original vision.

A lot of people have been paid to help build California’s railway.

The people who paid for it are still waiting to ride it.

Jimy’s Original

My friend Jimy’s updated document, Why You Should Vote Republican, contains all eight of his arguments and the supporting materials he collected. I encourage readers to examine it for themselves.

Why You Should Vote Republican

Independent Writing. Reader Supported.

For nearly two years, I’ve been researching, writing, and publishing essays examining the political promises, policies, and decisions that have shaped America. I don’t have a corporate sponsor, a political organization paying my bills, or a government grant keeping the lights on.

Everything I publish is free to read. I believe the information should be available to everyone, regardless of whether they can afford a subscription. But independent writing takes considerable time, research, and resources.

If you appreciate this work and want to help keep it going, here are three ways to support it:

• Become a paid subscriber and help support my ongoing research and writing.

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If you’re unable to contribute financially, sharing this essay with friends, family, or your social networks makes a difference, too.

To everyone already supporting my work, thank you. You’re the reason I can keep doing this.

“Substack gave independent writers a place to publish. But just like the mainstream media, you’ll never know what you’re not seeing.”

Substack is prominently promoting its 2026 Midterms page. Click through, and beneath the election predictions are four featured articles.

1. Why America Hates the Billionaire Barons of Big Tech
They despise America back
Robert Reich

2. Here Comes Trouble
Turns out Trump can’t fill a room like he used to
Dan Rather and Team Steady

3. Preznit Fuckwit knows he’s losing his mind, and it’s scaring him shitless
How’s it feel to be a loser, Donny?
Jeff Tiedrich

4. Donald Trump is snapping
Heather Delaney Reese

Four articles. Not one offering a favorable conservative perspective.

I checked again the following day. Different articles, same familiar slant. Dan Rather, Jeff Tiedrich, and Joyce Vance were featured criticizing or mocking Trump, while the “Most Popular” section offered more of the same. For a platform widely regarded as a refuge for independent and conservative writers, its midterm coverage looks an awful lot like the political commentary you'd find on CNN's homepage.

This is Substack, the platform that helped independent writers escape the political gatekeeping of traditional media.

Apparently, we can’t even have Substack. LOL.

Now, I can’t tell you whether those particular recommendations were selected by editors, an algorithm, or based on my reading habits. But I can tell you what appeared on the election page Substack presented to me. And it raises a question about who gets promoted, even on a platform built around independent publishing.

Substack gives writers a place to publish. But having a place to publish isn’t the same as having a platform that helps people discover your work. Anyone can start a publication, but the company still controls its recommendation systems, featured content, and much of the infrastructure that connects writers with readers.

You can be an independent writer without having an independent distribution system.

Traditional media organizations have editors, advertisers, corporate owners, and executives who influence what gets published and promoted. Independent writers can escape much of that structure, but they often exchange one kind of dependence for another. A change in an algorithm, a distribution policy, or a platform’s priorities can affect their ability to reach readers they’ve spent years attracting.

That’s why I don’t believe independent media should depend entirely on any one platform, including Substack. But building alternatives takes money.

A writer can chase advertising revenue, tailor content to please algorithms, spend most of his time working another job, or ask readers who value the work to help support it. Reader support allows a publication to answer more directly to its audience rather than advertisers or the people controlling distribution.

Which brings me to something I’ve received plenty of criticism for: asking readers to support mine.

Some of the feedback has been pretty harsh.

“Get a job.”

“Stop begging.”

“You’re pathetic.”

“I’m so sick of hearing your pitch.”

“There’s always something with you!”

Trust me, I’ve heard worse.

I realize I’ve asked for support more often than I’d like. Some readers are understandably tired of hearing it. So am I. In fact, I’m a lot more tired of living through the financial struggles that make those requests necessary.

But there’s something about me that longtime readers should understand. When I say I’m going to be honest, I don’t mean only about politics.

I’ve attached my real name and face to hundreds of essays addressing subjects that many people won’t touch. Race, crime, welfare, immigration, politics, and the destructive aspects of ghetto culture. I’ve criticized ideas, institutions, and behaviors that attract considerable hostility when a white man discusses them publicly.

I know what that can cost me. I write about them anyway because I believe the facts matter more than my comfort.

That same openness extends to my personal life. I’ve talked about driving Uber, losing clients, financial struggles, family problems, and the accident that took away my ability to earn money behind the wheel. I don’t share those things because I enjoy displaying my problems to the world and looking like a loser. Believe me, there are easier ways to spend an afternoon. I share them because they’re part of the reality behind the work.

I’m not asking people to finance some lavish lifestyle or just support a meager existence. I’m trying to build a sustainable independent media business, and like any business, that takes time, resources, and stability.

I recently saw a subscription pitch from The Epoch Times explaining that, as an independent outlet without a corporate or billionaire backer, it relies on subscribers to keep going.

Fair enough. I get it.

But I had to laugh a little. I’m over here eating ham sandwiches five or six days a week trying to build my own independent media operation.

Apparently, we’re both in independent media. Their version just has a slightly better grocery budget. LOL.

There are four stages to what I’m trying to accomplish.

First, my stability. I need to get out of the perpetual cycle of financial emergencies. It’s nearly impossible to concentrate on research, writing, and creating when you’re constantly wondering how you’re going to survive the next week.

Second, the brand’s stability. I want my publications to become reliable operations with enough financial breathing room to keep producing quality work, even when life throws another problem my way. My readers shouldn’t have to wonder whether the next emergency will bring everything to a halt.

Third, the brand’s growth. I’ve written hundreds of essays, but I want to do much more. I’ve already launched carnellknowledge.com, a second Substack publication that takes several of my longer, related essays and distills them into shorter, easier-to-digest articles. Not everyone has the time to read a 5,000-word essay, much less four of them. Carnell Knowledge gives those readers another way to benefit from the research I’ve already done.

I also briefly experimented with video, and I enjoyed it. There’s plenty of room for improvement, but that comes with practice, something that’s difficult to find time for when you’re constantly trying to stay afloat. I’d like to return to it and reach people who would rather watch a ten-minute video than read a lengthy essay.

Fourth, building related ventures. I want these projects to work together without depending on a single platform. My own websites, email distribution, writing, video, research, commentary, and educational material can reach different audiences while supporting the same larger operation.

Substack can remain part of that operation. I have no intention of abandoning a platform that’s helped me reach so many people. But I don’t want everything I’ve built to depend on one company’s decisions about what deserves attention.

You can’t build the fourth floor when you’re still struggling to keep the foundation from collapsing.

Reader support helps me get there. It gives me more time to research, improve my work, experiment with new formats, and develop a business that doesn’t fall apart every time life throws another problem at me.

I don’t expect everyone to contribute. I don’t even expect everyone to agree with me. My work is free to read, and I intend to keep it that way.

I won’t pretend that producing independent media costs nothing simply because asking for financial support makes some people uncomfortable.

Look at that Substack election page again. The articles may change, but the political perspectives being prominently featured haven't changed much in what I've seen.

Whatever determined those selections, it’s a reminder that being allowed to publish isn’t the same thing as being promoted. Writers who want greater independence need ways to reach readers beyond whatever a platform chooses to feature.

These things need to get done.

Clearly.

I’m trying to do my part. If you believe in what I’m building, your support helps me move beyond surviving long enough to publish the next essay and toward creating something much bigger.

That’s not begging. That’s building.

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If you value my work and want to help me expand into more writing, video, and independent platforms, please consider supporting it.

Every paid subscription, contribution, and share helps move this operation forward.

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Thank you to everyone who’s already helping make this possible.

“Funny how a man’s character can change overnight without the man changing nearly as much as the people judging him.”

In October 2012, Barbara Walters looked directly into a television camera and told Donald Trump that she considered him a brilliant businessman, a fascinating personality, and a decent man. She wasn’t promoting his latest television project or interviewing him about another real estate deal. She was criticizing him for demanding that Barack Obama release additional personal records, something she believed was making Trump look foolish.

Walters had known Trump for decades. Even while criticizing his behavior, she wanted viewers to understand that she regarded him as a friend and an accomplished businessman.

Less than three years later, Trump announced his Republican presidential campaign, and the celebrity who had spent decades being welcomed into television studios, political circles, and society events would become one of America’s most controversial political figures.

Elon Musk experienced a reversal of his own. Once celebrated for electric vehicles and technologies associated with environmental progress, he became deeply unpopular among Democrats as his political positions shifted rightward and he took control of Twitter.

John McCain’s experience was almost comical. Political journalists adored him when he challenged fellow Republicans, subjected him to far less flattering coverage during his 2008 presidential campaign, and watched Democrats celebrate him again when he opposed Donald Trump.

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The Media Machine

For more than half a century, America’s major news organizations have presented themselves as guardians of truth, impartiality, and democracy. Their history includes some spectacular failures involving Republican presidents and candidates, along with a remarkable ability to correct politically damaging stories after millions of Americans have already heard them.

In February 1968, Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam and told millions of CBS viewers that the war appeared headed toward a stalemate. The Communist Tet Offensive had suffered enormous military losses, but it had also shattered Washington’s repeated assurances that victory was approaching. Cronkite’s broadcast helped cement the belief that the war could not be won. A television anchorman had become one of the country’s most influential voices on whether America should continue fighting.

The Tet Offensive had failed to achieve its principal military objectives, yet its political consequences provided an unexpected benefit to North Vietnam. American confidence in the war deteriorated despite the enormous losses inflicted on Communist forces. What Hanoi failed to accomplish on the battlefield, it gained politically as public support for the war collapsed. Cronkite’s broadcast became one of the most prominent expressions of that loss of confidence.

Four years later came Watergate and the celebrated partnership of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The public knew about their mysterious source, Deep Throat, but didn’t learn his identity until 2005. He was Mark Felt, the FBI’s second-ranking official.

Woodward had known Felt since 1970, when he was a Navy officer assigned to the chief of naval operations and occasionally delivered documents to the White House. He already had a personal relationship with a senior FBI official before joining the reporters investigating Watergate.

An FBI executive secretly feeding information to journalists investigating a sitting Republican president deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives in the heroic retellings of Watergate. Nixon’s obstruction of justice was real. So was the role of a powerful government insider whose confidential assistance helped expose it.

In September 2004, CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast allegations about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, relying on documents the network ultimately couldn’t authenticate. Dan Rather initially defended the reporting before CBS acknowledged its failure and commissioned an independent investigation. The report aired less than two months before a presidential election.

CBS eventually admitted that it should never have used the documents. By then, the allegations had already received national publicity, and the controversy had become part of the election campaign.

During Trump’s presidency, the Russia investigation generated years of accusations, commentary, and speculation about possible coordination between his campaign and Moscow. The Mueller investigation ultimately did not establish that Trump or his campaign criminally conspired with Russia, although it documented Russian election interference and numerous contacts involving campaign associates.

Then there were the anonymous sources. “Officials familiar with the matter.” “People briefed on the investigation.” “Sources who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.”

During Trump’s first 126 days in office, Republican staff on the Senate Homeland Security Committee identified 125 news stories based on anonymous leaks involving potentially sensitive national-security information. Using a narrower, consistent sample of six major news outlets, they found 62 such stories under Trump, compared with eight concerning Obama’s administration and nine during George W. Bush’s equivalent opening period.

The Columbia Journalism Review later found that The New York Times alone used the phrase “people familiar with” more than 1,000 times in Trump-Russia stories between October 2016 and the end of his first term.

A thousand uses of a description that tells readers almost nothing about who is talking, what political interests they might have, or whether they’re passing along firsthand knowledge or somebody else’s account.

An anonymous official makes an allegation. A major newspaper publishes it. Television networks repeat it. The accusation becomes national news, while the person feeding the information to reporters remains conveniently invisible.

In December 2017, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross incorrectly reported that Trump had directed Michael Flynn to contact Russian officials during the presidential campaign. The instruction Ross was reporting concerned the presidential transition, after Trump had won. ABC apologized and suspended Ross for four weeks.

A story suggesting campaign coordination with Russia had circulated nationally before the network corrected the timeline.

Then came the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop controversy. During the closing weeks of the election, questions about the material’s authenticity dominated public debate, social-media companies restricted its distribution, and former intelligence officials publicly suggested possible Russian involvement.

In March 2022, The Washington Post reported that forensic experts had authenticated approximately 22,000 emails from a copy of the laptop data. The experts couldn’t verify every file or allegation circulating about the Biden family, but substantial portions of the material were genuine. Information that had been treated with considerable skepticism before the election was receiving forensic confirmation well afterward.

COVID provided another lesson in the dangers of declaring an unsettled question closed.

In February 2020, The Washington Post characterized Senator Tom Cotton’s concerns about a possible Wuhan laboratory origin as a debunked conspiracy theory. In June 2021, the newspaper revised its headline and acknowledged that it had inaccurately characterized his comments because the virus’s origin had not been determined.

In January 2025, the CIA publicly disclosed an assessment favoring a laboratory-related origin, although with low confidence. The FBI had also favored a laboratory origin. Neither assessment settled the scientific debate, but the possibility once dismissed by parts of the press had become a serious subject of intelligence investigation.

The media’s initial coverage of another event, on July 13, 2024, raised a different set of questions.

A gunman opened fire while Donald Trump was speaking at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was wounded, firefighter Corey Comperatore was killed, and two other spectators were seriously injured.

In the first moments, CNN published a headline describing Secret Service agents rushing Trump from the stage after he fell. The Washington Post initially described loud noises of uncertain origin. Those reports appeared during the confusion immediately following the gunfire, before authorities had confirmed the assassination attempt, and the coverage was updated as the facts emerged.

Early reports described a former president falling and hearing loud noises while images emerging from Butler showed him bleeding and surrounded by Secret Service agents. Even allowing for the uncertainty of breaking news, those initial descriptions conveyed remarkably little about the violence unfolding on the stage.

The FBI later confirmed that Trump had been struck by a bullet, whether whole or fragmented, after questions arose about the nature of his injury.

A presidential candidate had narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The contrast between the earliest descriptions and the reality of what happened became another controversy over how major news organizations frame extraordinary events.

Across these episodes, the circumstances and journalistic failures differed. But the stakes were enormous: a war, a presidential resignation, contested elections, federal investigations, a worldwide pandemic, and an attempted political assassination.

Americans were expected to trust the institutions explaining these events, even when those institutions got consequential facts wrong or presented unsettled questions with unwarranted certainty.

A network can apologize. A newspaper can change a headline. An editor can publish a correction. None of those actions guarantees that the millions who encountered the original story will see the revised version.

The accusations make the headlines. The corrections have to catch up.

And the same news organizations that make these judgments about national events also exercise enormous influence over which public figures Americans are encouraged to admire, distrust, or despise.

Donald Trump: Before He Became Public Enemy Number One

Donald Trump didn’t suddenly appear in American life when he descended the Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. He’d been a celebrity for decades, appearing on television, selling books, promoting businesses, and participating in the peculiar American tradition of becoming famous largely for being famous.

He was the outspoken New York billionaire with the enormous ego, extravagant lifestyle, and seemingly bottomless appetite for publicity. His name appeared on buildings, golf courses, television programs, and practically anything else somebody could persuade him to put it on.

In December 1987, Barbara Walters interviewed the 41-year-old businessman for ABC’s 20/20. The conversation included speculation about a possible presidential campaign, and Walters asked whether he’d want the presidency if he could have the job without campaigning.

Four months later, Oprah Winfrey raised the same possibility. During her April 1988 interview, Trump complained about America’s trade relationships, foreign governments benefiting from American markets, and the enormous expense of defending wealthy allies. Oprah asked whether he would ever consider running for president.

Trump said probably not, although he wouldn’t rule it out if he believed the country’s problems had become serious enough.

His complaints about international trade, American military commitments, and wealthy countries taking advantage of the United States would become central themes of his presidential campaigns nearly three decades later. He’d been discussing them publicly since the Reagan administration.

Trump was also a fixture of popular entertainment. In 1994, he appeared on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where the Banks family reacted enthusiastically to his arrival. The scene worked because viewers recognized Trump as a famous billionaire whose appearance was supposed to be exciting.

I remember a Black business acquaintance named Donny who actually went by Donny Trump. I’m serious. I have no idea whether he continued using that name after Trump entered Republican politics, but it illustrates the image Trump had developed among people who admired his wealth and business success.

In January 1999, Trump participated in Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project, an initiative intended to increase minority participation in corporate America. Trump provided space at 40 Wall Street for an event associated with the project, and Jackson publicly recognized his involvement.

Trump contributed money to Democrat Party campaigns. Bill and Hillary Clinton attended his 2005 wedding to Melania at Mar-a-Lago, and Bill Clinton later spoke warmly about Trump, recalling how well Trump had treated him and Hillary.

Trump hosted Saturday Night Live in April 2004 and again in November 2015, after announcing his Republican presidential campaign. That second appearance attracted protests over NBC giving him a platform, even as the episode drew a large audience.

In September 2016, Jimmy Fallon invited Trump onto The Tonight Show. During the interview, Fallon asked whether he could mess up Trump’s famous hair. Trump agreed, and Fallon ran his fingers through it while the audience laughed.

Critics accused Fallon of making Trump seem approachable and helping to normalize the Republican nominee. In June 2017, Fallon told Howard Stern that he’d misjudged the audience’s reaction. By the following year, he was still publicly discussing the backlash.

Apparently, messing up Donald Trump’s hair had become a transgression requiring years of explanation.

Stephen Colbert interviewed Trump on The Late Show in September 2015, after Trump had entered the Republican race. Four years later, Anderson Cooper asked whether he’d invite Trump back.

Colbert’s answer was brief: “The quick answer would be no.”

Colbert cited Trump’s conduct as president. By then, the celebrity who had been welcomed onto television for decades had become someone many entertainers wanted nothing to do with.

I’ve joked that if Trump had run for president as a Democrat, they’d probably have carved his face into Mount Rushmore by now. Same ego, same mouth, same gold-plated everything. Just a different letter next to his name.

The remarkable flexibility of “No one is above the law”

On August 8, 2022, FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence as part of an investigation involving presidential records and classified documents. Nancy Pelosi emphasized that no person was above the law.

Representative Ilhan Omar expressed similar sentiments following Trump’s March 30, 2023, indictment in New York.

In an official statement, Omar declared: “And no one is above the law.” She urged Americans to support accountability and follow the facts regardless of political affiliation.

Then, on October 12, 2026, federal agents executed a judicially authorized search warrant at Omar’s Washington home as part of a criminal investigation involving allegations concerning immigration records.

Omar described the action as an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. Prominent Democrats questioned the search, while her attorneys challenged the investigation and demanded the return of seized property.

Omar denies wrongdoing, and no charges against her had been publicly announced.

In 2023, Omar celebrated Trump’s indictment as evidence that the legal system could hold powerful people accountable. In 2026, confronted with a search of her own home, she accused federal authorities of political intimidation.

The investigations involved different allegations and circumstances. But Omar’s own declaration that Americans should follow the facts regardless of political affiliation makes her response to the search worth examining.

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Elon Musk: Saving the Planet Until He Moved Right

For years, Elon Musk represented much of what progressive politicians said America needed: electric vehicles, solar power, advanced battery technology, and reduced dependence on fossil fuels.

Tesla helped transform electric vehicles from expensive curiosities into desirable automobiles. SpaceX developed reusable rockets and changed the economics of commercial spaceflight. Musk became one of the world’s most recognizable entrepreneurs.

He also supported Democrat presidential candidates. Musk has said he voted for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In 2013, Richard Branson wrote a glowing tribute to Musk for TIME, praising his technological ambitions and pursuit of a cleaner-energy future. In December 2021, TIME named Musk Person of the Year.

California Governor Gavin Newsom was similarly enthusiastic. In October 2021, Newsom described Musk as an extraordinary talent and one of the world’s great innovators and entrepreneurs.

In 2022, Musk announced that he had voted Republican, publicly criticized the Democrat Party, and acquired Twitter. His approach to moderation, reinstatement of suspended accounts, and management of the platform became intensely controversial.

By November 2022, well before his endorsement of Trump, Democratic voters had turned sharply against him.

NBC News polling showed that among Democrats, positive feelings toward Musk had fallen to just 9 percent, while negative feelings reached 64 percent. In August 2021, those figures had been 21 percent positive and 28 percent negative.

Musk’s criticism of progressive politics grew louder, as did criticism of Musk. He became increasingly involved in Republican politics and, in July 2024, formally endorsed Trump.

In February 2025, Pew Research Center found that only 12 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents viewed him favorably, while 85 percent viewed him unfavorably.

And Gavin Newsom, the governor who once called Musk an extraordinary talent?

By March 2026, Newsom was describing him as one of the great disappointments of the era, criticizing Tesla’s business priorities and the growing dominance of Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers. Newsom continued to acknowledge Musk’s technological abilities but objected to the direction he was taking his businesses.

Tesla was still manufacturing electric vehicles, and SpaceX was still launching rockets. The technological achievements that originally brought Musk so much admiration hadn’t vanished.

But the man once celebrated for advancing cleaner transportation had become one of the most recognizable enemies of the political movement that championed it.

When electric cars become political targets

During 2025, Tesla vehicles, dealerships, storage facilities, and charging stations became targets of (mostly peaceful - lol) criminal attacks across the United States.

On March 21, 2025, the FBI warned about incidents in at least nine states involving arson, gunfire, vandalism, and threatening graffiti. Investigators identified attacks involving firearms and improvised incendiary devices.

At a Tesla facility in Las Vegas, vehicles were damaged by gunfire and fire, and the word Resist was spray-painted on the building. Other incidents involved incendiary devices thrown toward charging equipment, damaged dealerships, and privately owned automobiles.

Federal investigators treated the attacks seriously, and prosecutors pursued criminal charges involving dangerous weapons and incendiary devices.

For years, Americans had been encouraged to embrace electric vehicles as the future of clean transportation. Now criminals were attacking those same vehicles because they despised the political opinions of the man running Tesla.

The owner of a Tesla isn’t necessarily a Trump supporter. A dealership employee isn’t responsible for Musk’s statements. Someone using a charging station may simply be trying to get home.

The FBI noted that perpetrators might regard these attacks as victimless property crimes, which is a peculiar way to think about throwing Molotov cocktails or firing guns around buildings. Fires spread, people get injured, and firefighters risk their lives responding to somebody else’s political tantrum.

Setting fire to an electric vehicle because you hate Elon Musk is a rather strange way to demonstrate your commitment to saving the planet.

John McCain: The Republican the Press Loved, Hated, and Loved Again

I’ve never been much of a John McCain admirer.

McCain spent years cultivating a reputation as the Republican willing to challenge Republicans. He criticized party leaders, collaborated with Democrats, and made himself unusually accessible to national political reporters.

During his 2000 presidential campaign, journalists traveled with him aboard the Straight Talk Express, enjoying informal conversations, personal access, jokes, and lengthy interviews that other candidates frequently restricted.

McCain supplied colorful quotations, compelling personal history, and disagreements with his own party that made excellent stories. Reporters rewarded him with unusually enthusiastic coverage.

On March 5, 2000, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled The McCain-Media Chemistry. It examined the senator’s unusually favorable coverage and the enthusiasm he inspired among national political reporters.

The newspaper recalled a 1996 Esquire profile titled John McCain Walks on Water.

Apparently, the senator had achieved something considerably more impressive than winning a Republican primary. He had convinced journalists that his personal shortcomings were evidence of character.

The Los Angeles Times quoted a Newsweek assessment suggesting that even McCain’s failures added to his character. Political scientist Larry Sabato described the coverage as an extraordinary exercise in political mythmaking.

According to a Center for Media and Public Affairs study, 74 percent of stories about McCain during the week following the 2000 New Hampshire primary were favorable. For George W. Bush, the corresponding figure was 46 percent.

Even some reporters familiar with McCain’s record questioned the enthusiasm. Amy Silverman, who had covered him in Arizona, said local journalists were laughing at the overwhelmingly flattering national portrayal.

Jeff Cohen, founder of the progressive media-watch organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, criticized journalists for turning McCain into a moderate or liberal hero without adequately examining his political record.

Then came 2008.

McCain again pursued the Republican presidential nomination, but this time he won. By then, the reputation he’d cultivated as a political maverick was proving less comfortable.

Pew Research Center examined coverage of McCain’s personal narrative from January 1 through March 9, 2008. It found 57 percent negative and 43 percent positive. Much of the criticism centered on doubts about whether McCain was a dependable conservative.

During the general election against Obama, coverage became even more unfavorable.

Pew examined reporting from September 8 through October 16, 2008. It found that 57 percent of stories substantially involving McCain were negative, while only 14 percent were positive.

For Obama, 36 percent were positive and 29 percent negative. McCain received approximately four negative stories for every positive one.

The financial crisis dominated that period, and McCain’s campaign decisions contributed to his worsening coverage. But the numbers stood in sharp contrast to the affection national reporters had openly expressed during his challenge to Bush eight years earlier.

I’ve always wondered whether McCain mistook his unusually favorable relationships with journalists for something more durable. He’d spent years being celebrated as an independent Republican willing to challenge his own party, and perhaps he believed that affection would benefit him when he finally won the nomination.

Apparently, being the media’s favorite Republican came with an expiration date.

McCain lost to Obama. Then Donald Trump entered the White House, and McCain once again became a prominent Republican critic of a Republican president.

In July 2017, he cast the decisive Republican vote against a Senate proposal to repeal major provisions of Obamacare. His dramatic thumbs-down gesture became one of the defining images of his final years in office.

Democrats celebrated the vote. When McCain died in August 2018, prominent Democrat leaders offered glowing tributes, and Obama delivered a eulogy at his funeral.

The man Democrats had worked so hard to defeat a decade earlier was once again being celebrated as an American statesman.

McCain never changed parties. His relationship with the press and his reception among Democrats changed repeatedly, depending in part on which politicians he challenged and which political positions he took.

Who Decides What You Believe?

I’ve told my wife and kids for years not to judge people simply by what they say. Examine what they do, look at the results, and decide whether their actions support their claims.

When a politician or commentator praises someone’s independence, look at what happens when that independence produces an unwelcome result. When an entrepreneur is celebrated for changing an industry, see whether his accomplishments are still acknowledged after his political allegiance changes.

And when someone you’ve admired for years suddenly becomes the person you’re expected to despise, compare the new accusations with the historical record.

The media has enormous influence over public reputations because most Americans will never meet the people they’re being encouraged to admire or hate. They depend on interviews, news reports, commentary, and selected clips to form their impressions.

A propagandist doesn’t necessarily need to convince people of an outright lie. Sometimes all he needs to do is provide enough carefully selected truths that they never realize how much of the story they’re missing.

Help Keep Independent Voices Heard

Yesterday’s hero becomes today’s villain, and millions of Americans go along with it without asking what changed. I spend a considerable amount of time digging through old interviews, reporting, public records, and polling because the historical record often tells a very different story from today’s headlines.

I don’t have a newsroom, corporate sponsors, or a political organization funding this work. My readers make it possible.

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“Ted Kennedy got a second chance after Chappaquiddick. Mary Jo Kopechne never did. Voters sent him back to Washington seven times. There, he helped expand the immigration system he once promised wouldn’t fundamentally change America.”

On the night of July 18, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. His passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned in the submerged car. Kennedy escaped and waited approximately ten hours before reporting the accident to police.

He claimed to have made repeated attempts to rescue her, although nobody witnessed them. He acknowledged drinking earlier that evening but maintained that he had been sober. By the time police learned what had happened, any chance to determine reliably whether alcohol played a role was gone.

Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and received a two-month suspended sentence. An inquest found probable cause to believe his negligent driving contributed to Kopechne’s death. He was never prosecuted for manslaughter.

Sixteen months later, Massachusetts voters gave him another six years in the United States Senate, with 62.1 percent of the vote against Republican Josiah Spaulding. He would be reelected six more times.

Kennedy remained in Washington until his death in 2009, nearly forty years after Chappaquiddick. Along the way he helped establish the modern refugee system and sponsored legislation that expanded legal immigration. He had already played an important role in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a law he assured Americans would produce relatively modest changes.

The country got considerably more than it was promised. In 1965, approximately 9.6 million foreign-born people lived in the United States. By January 2025, the estimate had reached 53.3 million, before dipping to about 51.9 million by mid-2025. Immigration had become central to disputes over housing, employment, government spending, citizenship, and political representation.

How did a law sold as modest reform help produce changes of this magnitude? And as those changes became obvious, why did Washington keep expanding and modifying the system instead of reconsidering its assumptions? His career is a useful lens, because it shows how an election held on one day can shape laws that govern the country long after the voters, and sometimes the politicians, are gone.

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The Promise of 1965

When Ted Kennedy arrived in the Senate in 1962, America was the world’s leading industrial economy. Its factories produced automobiles, aircraft, machinery, and household appliances. American workers enjoyed rising productivity, higher real incomes, and expanding opportunities to own homes and raise families. All of this happened during a period of comparatively limited immigration.

The Immigration Act of 1924 established national-origins quotas that favored Northern and Western Europe while restricting immigration from other regions. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 retained much of that system while establishing preferences for family relationships and employment qualifications. By the 1960s, civil rights politics, Cold War pressures, and lobbying by immigrant communities had created support for replacing the quotas. But America already had an immigration system, and the economy wasn’t waiting for Congress to invent a new one before it could prosper.

In 1930, foreign-born residents were about 11.6 percent of the population. By 1970 the figure had fallen to 4.7 percent, the lowest share in modern American history. During those decades the country helped win the Second World War, built an enormous industrial base, developed new technologies, and grew at an extraordinary pace. Earlier immigrants had contributed to that industrial development, and the postwar economy also benefited from American innovation, wartime investment, abundant natural resources, and the devastation of industrial competitors overseas. Still, a question seldom gets asked. If prosperity depended on ever-increasing immigration, how did the country become so prosperous when immigration was unusually low?

President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his administration wanted to eliminate the national-origins quota system. Civil rights politics played a major role, as did Cold War concerns about America’s image abroad. Established immigrant communities, particularly those of Southern and Eastern European origin, had lobbied for years for more opportunities to bring relatives into the country. The administration first proposed a system emphasizing occupational qualifications and family ties, and congressional negotiations shifted the balance toward family reunification.

Under the law as enacted, family categories received most of the numerically limited preference visas for the Eastern Hemisphere, and immediate relatives of citizens, including spouses, unmarried minor children, and parents of adult citizens, were exempt from numerical ceilings. Think about what that meant over time. An immigrant admitted for one reason could become a permanent resident, later qualify for citizenship, and eventually sponsor eligible relatives, some of whom might become citizens and sponsor others. The process had eligibility requirements and limits, but its cumulative effect could reach far beyond the original admission. Congress built that system deliberately.

Those were unusually confident promises about a law designed to change how immigrants would be selected. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach offered similar assurances, telling lawmakers the legislation wasn’t intended to increase immigration numbers significantly. President Johnson signed it on October 3, 1965, at the Statue of Liberty.

Here is what followed. The Pew Research Center estimated that nearly 59 million immigrants arrived between 1965 and 2015. Counting their children and grandchildren, those arrivals accounted for about 55 percent of the country’s population growth over those fifty years, and the foreign-born population reached 45 million by 2015. Immigration from Asia and Latin America expanded dramatically while Europe’s share declined.

Kennedy and his colleagues fundamentally changed America’s immigration system in 1965. They replaced the national-origins quotas with a system that prioritized family reunification and opened new pathways for immigration from countries that had previously faced severe restrictions. Those changes shaped immigration patterns for generations, and Congress continued expanding the system in the decades that followed. The consequences were considerably larger than Kennedy had promised Americans.

Were they mistaken, or did they reassure Americans about changes they privately expected? The answer depends on what they knew, and the public record can’t settle that. It does establish that the predictions were wrong. Before looking at how Kennedy responded as the country changed, we should examine one of the economic arguments most often used to defend immigration.

What on Earth Did We Do Before Mexicans?

Listening to politicians, you might conclude that before Mexican workers arrived, America’s hotel beds went unmade, restaurants served dinner on dirty plates, and farmers stood helplessly beside rotting crops. Apparently nobody knew how to mop a floor.

We’ve all heard that immigrants do jobs Americans won’t do. Democrat politicians have said it for decades, and some Republicans have repeated it too, including President George W. Bush when he proposed expanding temporary foreign-worker programs in 2004. It’s a strange claim given that Americans have been farming, cooking, cleaning, building, mining, and manufacturing for generations. Millions still do those jobs.

The real question is what employers must offer to attract workers, and what happens when they can’t find enough people at the pay on offer. A hotel manager might insist Americans won’t clean rooms for $13 an hour. Perhaps not, especially in a city where housing is expensive and schedules are unpredictable. Would more applicants appear at $18 or $22? Would better conditions change the answer? Could the hotel use better equipment, fewer labor hours, or higher room rates? Those are costs and tradeoffs, and businesses make such decisions every day. A labor shortage doesn’t always mean a shortage of people willing to work. Sometimes it means a shortage of people willing to work on the terms offered.

And agricultural workers aren’t necessarily working for pocket change. In April 2025, the USDA reported average wages of $19.52 an hour for hired farmworkers, with some regions exceeding $20. Temporary agricultural workers can also receive employer-provided housing and transportation. That’s considerably more than many Americans probably imagine. Which brings us back to the question: what would employers have to offer to attract Americans to do the same work?

Agriculture offers a historical test. Starting in 1942, the federal government ran the Bracero Program, bringing Mexican workers to American farms under temporary arrangements. It eventually supplied hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers a year and ended in 1964, one year before the immigration overhaul. Supporters of ending it hoped domestic farmworkers would see better wages and more work.

Economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel examined what happened. Their 2018 study in the American Economic Review compared states that had depended heavily on Bracero labor with those that had depended on it less, and found no statistically detectable increase in domestic agricultural wages or employment from excluding those workers. Instead, many growers adopted labor-saving technology or changed their crops. The farms didn’t disappear, but domestic workers didn’t get the raises reformers expected either.

The availability of immigrant labor shapes business decisions, and its absence can push employers toward machinery and other methods. Whether a given immigration policy helps American workers depends on the industry, the workers involved, and how employers respond. You also can’t prove that native-born workers are unwilling or unable to do restaurant or hotel work just because employers struggle to hire at a particular wage. The same goes for roadside fruit vendors. Americans have run farm stands and small retail businesses since long before the modern immigration system. An immigrant selling mangoes at an intersection may simply be an entrepreneur.

The argument gets more serious when we look at workers who face real competition, and Black Americans are an important example. In Los Angeles, sociologist Roger Waldinger studied employers in restaurants, hotels, printing, and furniture manufacturing. He found that immigrant recruitment networks shaped who heard about vacancies and who got recommended. Once an employer had a reliable network, hiring from the same circles was convenient, and applicants outside it could struggle to get considered. Black workers were among those facing that barrier.

Economists George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson examined immigration and Black male employment from 1960 to 2000. They estimated that a 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a skill group reduced Black workers’ wages in that group by 2.5 percent and lowered Black male employment rates by 5.9 percentage points. These figures are estimates from the authors’ economic model, not a measurement of the entire historical employment decline. Other researchers have found smaller effects. The National Academies’ broad review found small average effects on native wages overall, with the largest effects falling on earlier immigrants and workers without a high school diploma. Factory closures, discrimination, education, incarceration, and the movement of jobs out of urban neighborhoods also shaped Black employment. But the findings point to something missing from the slogan: some existing workers compete directly with new arrivals.

And where were the unions while all this was happening? For decades, organized labor warned that expanding the supply of immigrant workers could undercut American wages. Then, in 2000, the AFL-CIO reversed course, backing legalization for millions of illegal immigrants and calling for the elimination of existing employer sanctions. Union leaders argued that legalization would protect workers from exploitation. But were they protecting the workers they already represented, including Black Americans facing greater competition, or pursuing policies that might replenish their declining membership?

The minimum wage adds another wrinkle. Facing a legal wage floor, employers may become pickier about experience when many people apply for the same jobs, and hiring networks can influence who gets the opportunity. Immigrant and native-born workers are legally entitled to the same minimum wage, though violations and differences in bargaining power can affect actual pay. If immigration helps employers fill positions while raising competition for certain workers, those are two sides of the same transaction. A business can benefit while a particular worker has a harder time finding a job or negotiating pay.

An employer’s desire for more workers is understandable, but it is a business interest, not a complete argument for national policy. Kennedy told Americans workers wouldn’t lose jobs because of the bill, while Congress was making consequential changes to the labor supply. The workers already here deserved more than a few reassuring sentences.

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The Senator Who Stayed

The 1970 election didn’t create the 1965 law, which passed four years before Chappaquiddick. It did preserve Kennedy’s chance to influence what came next, and his role was more than voting for legislation others wrote. In 1978 he helped establish the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, which studied the existing system and considered changes to admissions, enforcement, legalization, and refugees. In 1979 he introduced a comprehensive refugee bill, describing a systematic resettlement program as something he had pursued for years.

The resulting Refugee Act of 1980, signed by President Carter, created the modern statutory framework for refugee admissions and asylum. America had admitted refugees before, usually through special arrangements for particular crises. Now Congress established a permanent system with a definition based on persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution, including procedures for overseas admissions and for people seeking asylum after arriving. Refugees could eventually obtain permanent residence and citizenship, allowing them to vote, run for Congress, and sponsor eligible relatives.

One of those refugees was Ilhan Omar, who arrived from Somalia in 1995, became an American citizen in 2000, and was elected to Congress in 2018. She came to America seeking refuge, gained citizenship, and eventually secured a seat in Congress, where she has repeatedly attacked the very American policies and institutions that made her journey possible.

Kennedy was also the principal Senate sponsor of the legislation that became the Immigration Act of 1990. He introduced S. 358 on February 7, 1989, and President George H. W. Bush signed the bill in November 1990. It raised the overall level of legal immigration and reorganized employment-based categories, including those for certain professional and temporary workers. He wasn’t the only architect. Presidents signed these laws, Congress supplied the votes, and members of both parties shaped them. But he helped write the original overhaul, stayed in office after Chappaquiddick, and led two more major immigration laws.

Problems kept growing. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, signed by Reagan, legalized about 2.7 million unauthorized immigrants and barred employers from knowingly hiring unauthorized workers. It was meant to pair legalization with stronger enforcement, but document fraud, continued labor demand, and uneven enforcement complicated the results, and the unauthorized population grew to an estimated 12 million around 2007.

In 1996, President Clinton signed a law creating expedited removal and credible-fear screening for people expressing fear of persecution. The screening was quick, but a positive finding generally meant the person could pursue further proceedings rather than being turned away. About 1,200 credible-fear screenings were completed in 1997. By 2018, annual completions approached 98,000. At the end of fiscal year 2024, immigration courts faced roughly 3.6 million pending cases.

Kennedy died in 2009, before the most recent asylum surge, and the later problems came from decisions by many other lawmakers and presidents. But the refugee and immigration frameworks he helped shape stayed at the center of the system. That raises a question beyond Kennedy. Why did the federal government keep revising immigration law without ever reaching a durable agreement on how much immigration the country should accommodate and how it would affect Americans already here?

Why Didn’t Washington Put on the Brakes?

Several groups have understandable reasons to maintain or expand particular programs, and some wield far more influence in Washington than ordinary workers or taxpayers. Employers want workers. Universities recruit international students. Families want relatives admitted. Humanitarian groups advocate for refugees. Immigration attorneys, contractors, and nonprofit agencies operate inside the administrative system Congress created. A university may collect tuition, a refugee agency may receive grants, and an advocacy organization may gain influence by representing a growing constituency. These interests sometimes conflict, since businesses seeking employment visas don’t necessarily want what refugee or family-reunification groups want.

But those who benefit from established programs usually have stronger reasons to organize than those who bear dispersed costs. A construction worker facing more competition may never know which visa categories or employer practices shaped his local market. A business association knows exactly which bill it wants Congress to change. That difference influences outcomes.

During President Bill Clinton’s Democrat administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched Citizenship USA to accelerate naturalization before the 1996 presidential election. More than one million immigrants became American citizens that fiscal year. A Justice Department Inspector General investigation later uncovered serious failures in background checks and eligibility reviews, along with explicit discussions inside the Clinton White House about the electoral benefits of faster naturalization.

A January 1996 briefing memorandum for Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes stated that faster naturalization meant more potential Democrat voters. Officials working through Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review pressured immigration authorities to accelerate processing. One March 1996 email referred to producing a million new citizens before Election Day. Another proposal, forwarded to President Clinton and Vice President Gore, called for influencing 300,000 voters and turning out 96,000 in the presidential election.

The Inspector General documented the political discussions, increased pressure, and compromised processing, although investigators did not establish that the program was originally created to benefit the Democrat Party. By 1996, officials in a Democrat administration were discussing immigration and citizenship in explicitly electoral terms, while the agency responsible for enforcing the rules was struggling to follow them.

Federal refugee programs grew into extensive arrangements involving national resettlement agencies, local affiliates, nonprofits, and public institutions. In fiscal year 2024, specified federal funding for refugee-related programs across the State Department, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security approached $2.8 billion. Those funds covered different functions and forms of assistance, and they weren’t all payments to contractors or nonprofits. But public money flowing through an established network raises ordinary questions about incentives, oversight, administrative costs, and lobbying. Who gets the grants? What services are provided? How much goes to administration? Which recipients lobby to keep or expand the programs that fund them?

Who decides that employers need more foreign workers? In technology, the H-1B program has become a major route for employing foreign professionals, and in fiscal year 2024 Indian nationals accounted for about 71 percent of approved petitions, including renewals and other filings. That concentration raises questions about outsourcing, wages, recruitment practices, and how firms determine that domestic workers aren’t available. It also shows how immigration policy gets tied up with business models. Once companies organize operations around a labor program, changing the rules becomes politically hard. The country can certainly benefit from talented people who move here. It can also ask whether a specific visa improves opportunities for domestic workers or lets employers avoid other investments, and answer with evidence on wages, recruitment, productivity, and labor-market conditions.

What bothers me about the familiar claim that America needs more workers is how casually it assumes employers’ interests settle the matter. Americans built an extraordinarily productive economy during decades of relatively low immigration. Employers adjusted then, and they can adjust now. Whether the adjustments are desirable depends on the consequences, not on how loudly business groups complain about shortages.

What Happened to California

As immigration expanded, it also transformed particular states, and California shows how federal decisions can have consequences far from Washington.

Ronald Reagan won the California governorship in 1966 and 1970, then carried the state in 1980 and 1984. In 1984 he received about 57.5 percent of its presidential vote. Forty years later Donald Trump received about 38.3 percent and Kamala Harris about 58.5 percent. California has gone to the Democrat presidential candidate in every election since 1992, and Democrats have held legislative supermajorities for much of the recent period.

The state’s population changed enormously over those decades. By 2024, California had about 10.9 million foreign-born residents, roughly 28 percent of its population. Immigration contributed substantially to growth in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and other regions, and naturalization and the American-born children of immigrants gradually changed the electorate.

In 1994, California voters approved Proposition 187 by a decisive 59-to-41-percent margin. Backed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, the measure sought to restrict public benefits and services for illegal immigrants. But the voters never got what they approved. Federal Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, appointed by Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1978, blocked most of the measure, ruling that it conflicted with federal immigration law and constitutional requirements. Then, in 1999, Democrat Governor Gray Davis abandoned California’s appeal, effectively burying the initiative. Nearly six out of ten voters had supported it, only to watch a federal judge strike down its central provisions and a Democrat governor abandon the fight to defend them. Pfaelzer died in 2015, but the political and legal consequences of Proposition 187 remain part of California’s immigration debate today.

The political irony is hard to miss. The Democrat Party frequently accuses Republicans of authoritarianism, while its progressive allies march under banners proclaiming “No Kings.” Yet when California voters approved an immigration measure by a substantial majority, the result was blocked by a federal judge and the legal fight was abandoned by a Democrat governor. The court relied on federal supremacy and constitutional law, but the episode raises a question about how much control voters actually have over policies affecting their communities.

Political scientists James Monogan and Austin Doctor estimated that Pete Wilson’s embrace of Proposition 187 produced a lasting 7.1-percentage-point shift toward the Democrat Party among California Hispanic voters and an estimated 4.3-point shift in statewide partisan identification. Those figures reflect the estimated political reaction to the campaign, rather than the electoral effect of immigration itself. California’s realignment also involved changing suburban preferences, social issues, education, internal migration, and the evolving positions of both parties. Immigration contributed significantly to the state’s changing population, while naturalization and voters’ reactions to immigration politics helped reshape its electorate over time.

Representation is affected even when immigrants don’t vote. The census counts residents regardless of citizenship, and those counts decide how the 435 House seats are divided among states. Because each state’s Electoral College votes include its House seats, population changes can shift political power before anyone qualifies to vote. That method is constitutional and predates 1965, and the number of seats affected in any decade requires careful calculation because every state’s population is changing. But the mechanism is simple: immigration changes population, and population influences representation.

The state that elected Reagan four times is politically very different today. The question is how much of that change would have happened under the immigration system that existed before Congress began altering it in 1965.

Sixty Years Later, We're Still Paying

In February 1965, Ted Kennedy told Americans that immigration reform would not flood their cities, upset their ethnic composition, or cost workers their jobs. More than sixty years of evidence now lets us test those assurances.

The effects have been uneven. More households raised demand for housing, especially where construction was already limited by expensive land, restrictive zoning, permitting, and infrastructure. California shows it: immigration was an important contributor to population growth while housing supply in its major metros failed to keep up. The affordability crisis has several causes, but added demand was one of them.

Schools and public services felt it too. In 2021, American public schools enrolled 5.3 million students classified as English learners, representing 10.6 percent of enrollment. In Texas, the figure was more than 20 percent. Teaching children who speak little English requires specialized teachers, additional instruction, assessments, and sometimes translators. All of that costs money. It also creates practical challenges in ordinary classrooms, where teachers must divide their attention between students who understand the language of instruction and those still learning it. When schools lack sufficient support, instruction can slow and other students may receive less individual attention. Meanwhile, growing populations require more classrooms, roads, water systems, emergency services, and healthcare. New workers and businesses generate tax revenue, but the costs of accommodating population growth often fall on local governments first. The National Academies found that first-generation immigration can impose net fiscal costs on state and local governments, particularly through education, even as subsequent generations contribute more in taxes over time. Washington establishes immigration policy, but local taxpayers, teachers, and school districts have to manage much of its immediate impact.

Employment works similarly. Immigration can expand production, supply needed skills, and increase demand, and it can also intensify competition in specific occupations. That’s why the Black employment research and the Bracero experience matter: changes in labor supply affect wages, recruitment, technology, and job opportunities in ways politicians rarely explain in a slogan.

“It’s better here. Until it isn’t. Then where do they go?”

Then there’s the bureaucracy. We built a system that can admit and process large numbers of people without the capacity to resolve every case promptly. By fiscal year 2024, immigration courts held about 3.6 million pending cases, including roughly 1.5 million defensive asylum applications. The backlog came from migration patterns, enforcement choices, limited judicial capacity, and years of shifting policy, and it left costs, legal uncertainty, and disputes over whether immigration law could be enforced consistently.

Kennedy helped shape immigration policy at three decisive moments: the 1965 overhaul, the Refugee Act of 1980, and the Immigration Act of 1990. Each had support from other lawmakers, but Kennedy remained an influential advocate across all three. His career connects the promises of the 1960s with legislation that continued shaping America for generations.

It also shows a problem of democratic accountability. An election happens on a particular day. The legislation that follows can shape the country for decades. A voter can replace a politician after six years, but replacing the laws he helped enact is another matter. By then businesses have reorganized around them, agencies have been built to administer them, and millions of people have made life decisions based on them. Coalitions form to protect the arrangement, and changing course means taking on the interests that have accumulated around it. The people who authorized the law may be retired or dead by the time the consequences are fully visible.

That is what happened after Chappaquiddick. Massachusetts voters knew the circumstances of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death and that Kennedy had waited ten hours to report it, and they sent him back anyway, then six more times. His assurances remain in the congressional record, along with the laws he helped write and decades of population and economic data. The families paying higher housing costs, the workers facing competition in particular occupations, the taxpayers funding public programs, and the citizens of states whose political balance has changed all have reason to ask how it happened, and whether the people responsible understood what they were doing.

Kennedy is gone, and so are many of the voters who returned him after Chappaquiddick. The laws are still here.

Politicians come and go.
Their decisions can haunt us for generations.

I spend a considerable amount of time researching and writing essays like this because Americans deserve to know how we got here, who made the decisions, and what those decisions have cost us.

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The politicians have plenty of people protecting their legacies. I’d rather examine them.

Refer a friend

“I’ve spent years worrying about whether I could give my family enough. I hadn’t thought much about how suddenly I could lose the chance to try.”

There’s something I haven’t told you about last Wednesday’s accident. When the other car struck the driver’s door and front panel beside where I was sitting, the impact spun my car approximately 180 degrees.

There was open space to my right for the car to make that 180. I keep thinking about what might have happened if another vehicle or a curb had blocked it. I can’t know for certain, but I believe that room to spin may have saved my life.

I was heading to pick up an Uber passenger, doing something I had done countless times before. I had bills to pay and work waiting at home. Then an oncoming driver turned left into my car, and within seconds, everything changed.

My first thought was, “What am I going to do now? I’m letting my family down.”

I had tears in my eyes. It was one of the first things I said in the ambulance, still stunned and trying to understand what had happened. The car was how I was keeping us afloat, and suddenly it was gone. Before I even knew how badly I was hurt, I was worrying about how I would take care of my family.

Nearly a week later, I’m still finding out what I’m dealing with physically.

I saw a doctor today. She examined my spine and said my symptoms sound consistent with a concussion. She also raised concern about a possible injury to one of the small bones in my hand. Another hand X-ray and a scan of my back are being arranged.

The headache hasn’t gone away. Neither has the pain between my shoulder blades. My hand makes typing difficult, and my thinking feels cloudy. My wife has noticed that I’m stuttering more and sometimes struggling to get words out. Sitting or standing for very long hurts, so working means frequent breaks. I don’t yet know how long recovery will take.

I’d like to tell you that I’ve handled all of this with unwavering optimism. I haven’t.

There are moments when I feel more determined than ever, almost unbreakable, which is probably a strange word to use while waiting for another X-ray. There are other moments when I wonder how many more obstacles I can manage. I give my family the same encouragement many of you probably give yours: keep trying, keep going, things can improve. Some days, I struggle to believe my own speech.

I’m 58. Starting over feels different when you have a family depending on you and very little room for another mistake. I’ve worked hard, made decisions I regret, and spent plenty of time wondering how I ended up here. Losing the car brought all of that to the surface at once.

But I still want to build something. I still have things to say and people I hope to reach.

If I’m lucky, perhaps I have another twenty or thirty years. Maybe less. I knew that before Wednesday, but it feels different now. I want to spend those years doing something useful, including the writing so many of you have supported.

I write about government waste and corruption, the rewriting of history, and political ideas I believe threaten the freedoms and opportunities we inherited. I want people to question what they’re told and understand where those ideas lead before their children have to live with the consequences.

I think about my kids, your kids, and their kids. They’ll inherit whatever we leave behind, including the problems we were too comfortable or too intimidated to confront. I want them to have the chance to build a business, raise a family, speak their minds, and appreciate their country without being taught to feel ashamed of it.

I can’t fix all of that from a keyboard. But I can research, explain, challenge an argument, and give someone a reason to look again. That work is worth continuing.

Right now, continuing means recovering, accepting help, and working in shorter stretches. I’m also rebuilding my website and SEO business from home. I want to get my family onto firmer ground, where one bad day doesn’t take away the income paying our bills.

Many of you have already helped. Readers contributed through Buy Me a Coffee, became paid subscribers, sent money through Venmo, and wrote to check on me. The money helped with an immediate crisis. The messages meant a great deal too. Thank you for both.

The car is still gone, the Uber income has stopped, and the injuries are making my other work harder. If you’d like to help with a one-time contribution, you can do that through Buy Me a Coffee below. A paid subscription is another way to support my writing and help me keep doing it. My articles will remain free to read.

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I wish Wednesday had been an ordinary day of driving, earning money, and coming home to my family. It wasn’t. But I did come home, and I’m grateful for the chance to figure out what comes next.

I still have work to do.

Chris

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“Iran's leftists helped Islamic extremists seize power. The extremists thanked them with prison cells, torture, and firing squads. Apparently, the American left still hasn't learned the lesson.”

Forty-seven years ago, leftists helped a revolution that delivered Iran into the hands of an Islamic dictatorship. They saw the Shah of Iran, an American ally, as an American-backed oppressor and treated his religious opponents as allies in liberation. The radical clerics who consolidated power went on to imprison and execute many of their former revolutionary allies, including student activists and leftists who had helped them gain power.

Today, many on the left here in America are making the same ideological bargain with that dictatorship and the movements it sponsors. Opposition to America and Israel earns these forces sympathy from people who would never accept their rule over their own lives. Forty-seven years of repression should have destroyed the illusion. Instead, the same hostility toward the West keeps producing excuses for its enemies.

In January 2026, Iranian security forces massacred protesters by the thousands. In March, American activists gathered in New York to honor Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who had presided over that government. They brought candles and flowers. Before we get to the people arranging the tribute, we need to remember the people who paid for the system he led.

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The Freedoms Iranian Women Lost

Look at photographs of Tehran before the revolution and you will recognize quite a bit. Women wearing skirts. University students with their hair uncovered. People going to work, meeting friends, and dressing in ways that would not have attracted a second glance on an American campus. These photographs often surprise people whose entire picture of Iran consists of black chadors, angry demonstrations, and clerics telling everyone else how to live. The women in those older photographs were Iranians, too. They belonged to that country every bit as much as the men who later decided how much of their bodies the public could be trusted to see.

Women gained voting rights in 1963. The Family Protection Laws of 1967 and 1975 expanded their rights in divorce and child custody, restricted polygamy, and raised the standard marriage age for women to eighteen. These reforms changed questions with enormous practical consequences: whether a husband could simply discard his wife, what happened to the children, and how much authority courts could exercise over family disputes. Female university enrollment reached roughly 43,000 by 1976. An education, a profession, and greater independence were becoming attainable for more women. They had something to lose.

The photographs do not show all of Iran. Secular modernization was most visible among educated urban families, while conservative communities and religious households continued their traditions. Plenty of women covered their hair. Veiled and unveiled women lived in the same country. The dispute was over whether a government could force the second group to dress like the first.

That distinction should be easy for Americans who talk constantly about bodily autonomy. A woman choosing a religious covering exercises a choice. A woman threatened with punishment for refusing one is obeying an order. Calling both situations “culture” conveniently makes the official with the power to punish disappear from the picture. It also erases the women who resisted him. They become props in somebody else’s argument about respecting traditions, even when the tradition being defended is one they are trying to escape.

An education offers no protection from officials determined to control your life. What happens when an educated woman says no? Iran’s clerics had given their answer long before they acquired the power to enforce it.

The Enemy of My Enemy

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned the Family Protection Law in 1967, declaring divorces granted under it invalid. His lectures in 1970 outlined government under Islamic jurists. The proposal gave religious authorities the power to determine whether the country was being governed according to Islamic law. Anyone supporting women’s independence or secular government had an obvious question to ask: what happens when our rights conflict with his interpretation of religion?

You did not need a crystal ball. Reading what the man said would have been a decent start.

His revolutionary partners were focused on removing Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah. Marxists, students, secular nationalists, and religious militants could agree that he should go without agreeing on what would follow. For an anti-imperialist left that viewed American influence as a central obstacle to liberation, the Shah’s relationship with Washington helped define the struggle. Khomeini opposed an American ally. That made cooperation attractive, even though his answer to the question of who should rule was fundamentally incompatible with theirs.

A coalition can conceal that disagreement for a while. At a demonstration, everyone can shout against the same government. After victory, someone must command the security forces, determine which laws apply, and decide whether the other factions may continue organizing. An agreement about whom to overthrow settles none of those questions. It may only postpone the fight until one partner has acquired the power to crush the others.

Iran’s communist Tudeh Party announced full support for Khomeini in January 1979 and subsequently backed the Islamic Republic on anti-imperialist grounds. By September 1980, it was encouraging members to report the new government’s opponents to the authorities. Opposition to the Shah’s repression had led to cooperation with another government’s repression. The identity of the jailer had changed, and so had the party’s willingness to object. The party could call this service to a larger struggle. The people being reported still had to face the security services.

Western intellectuals contributed their own reassurances. In February 1979, Princeton professor Richard Falk published “Trusting Khomeini” in The New York Times. He suggested Iran might offer a “model of humane governance” and anticipated that Khomeini would provide guidance rather than ordinary governmental rule. There is a considerable difference between studying what a revolutionary leader says and imagining that he will become the leader you would prefer. A Princeton affiliation does not make that distinction less important.

Carter’s administration was meanwhile struggling to respond to the collapse of an American ally, with disagreements over how to handle the crisis. Carter had supported the Shah. His administration’s failed efforts to influence events belong in this history, but its role was different from that of people actively endorsing Khomeini. Washington failed to preserve its position; revolutionary supporters helped legitimize an alternative whose intentions deserved far more scrutiny. Iranians inherited the consequences after the speeches and policy arguments were over.

Khomeini’s victory ultimately produced a system in which elected offices operated beneath clerical authority. The supreme leader commanded the armed forces and possessed sweeping appointment powers. The Guardian Council screened candidates and judged legislation against constitutional and Islamic requirements. Voters could participate, but authorities determined who was allowed to compete. An election offers limited protection when the people exercising power can exclude those who challenge the basis of their rule.

Then the Revolution Came for Its Friends

Women protested attempts to impose compulsory covering in March 1979. The government kept pushing. Hijab became compulsory in government offices in 1980, and by 1983, appearing publicly without the prescribed covering could bring up to seventy-four lashes. The promised liberation had acquired a dress code and a whip. Women who objected were now challenging officials who claimed religious authority to tell them what to wear.

The universities presented another problem for the new rulers. Students had helped weaken the monarchy, and campuses remained places where leftist organizations could recruit and organize. During the Cultural Revolution that began in 1980, authorities closed universities, purged professors and students, and barred thousands of students from returning. The Iran Human Rights Documentation Center identifies the removal of leftist groups from their university bases as a central political objective. Those students’ earlier participation in the revolution did not entitle them to maintain institutions capable of opposing its winners.

The same report tells the story of Mina Yazdani, who entered medical school in Shiraz in 1976. After the closures, she learned that she would not be allowed to complete her studies because she was a Baha’i, a member of a religious community persecuted by the Islamic Republic. She eventually left Iran and continued her education abroad. The state had turned a young woman’s religion into grounds for abandoning the profession she had planned to enter.

Others lost much more. Mehdi Alavi Shushtari, a Marxist student activist, had been imprisoned under the Shah and later opposed the Islamic Republic. According to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center’s memorial account, he was denied a defense lawyer, defended political activity at universities as a right, and was executed in June 1980. His mother described seeing evidence of injuries during a prison visit and hearing him explain the torture he had endured. His opposition to the monarchy had offered no protection from the government that replaced it.

Amnesty International recorded 2,616 executions in 1981, including 2,444 after June 20. Many people executed during the repression of 1981 and 1982 belonged to opposition organizations whose members had initially supported the revolution. In 1983, the authorities turned on Tudeh itself. The party that had cooperated with the Islamic Republic discovered how little its cooperation guaranteed once the rulers no longer found it useful.

During the prison massacres of 1988, authorities killed thousands of political prisoners, including secular leftists. Human Rights Watch cites estimates of approximately 2,800 to 5,000 deaths. Many victims were already serving sentences. They were in state custody, where the authorities controlled their movements and their access to the outside world. The government had them locked up and killed them anyway.

People who expected to negotiate their differences after the revolution discovered that their negotiating partners controlled the prisons. Khomeini’s earlier declarations were now government policy.

The Islamic Republic also extended its influence abroad through money, weapons, and armed organizations, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the Houthis in Yemen. Iranian support gave these movements resources and helped Tehran exert power beyond its borders. This was not a simple procession of countries becoming copies of Iran. Influence could operate through armed groups powerful enough to obstruct governments, wage war, and impose their will without formally taking over an entire state.

Calling those groups “resistance” tells us whom they fight. It tells us very little about the freedom of the people who must live under them. That is the question their American admirers keep finding ways to avoid.

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From Campus Activism to Political Power

The Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, recruits candidates, organizes campaigns, and sets endorsement conditions. Its criteria instruct candidates to regard themselves as socialist organizers first and legislators second. The organization wants officeholders who will help build its movement, not simply accept volunteers at election time and disappear afterward.

Campaign workers and endorsements are valuable to ambitious politicians. What do candidates accept in return?

On October 7, 2023, DSA’s national statement condemned the killing of all civilians while describing the day’s events as a “direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime.” It also promoted a campaign led by DSA member Zohran Mamdani to cut financial support reaching Israel. Hamas had carried out the massacre. The organization promptly supplied an explanation centered on Israeli culpability and directed readers toward political organizing in New York.

The International Committee was more explicit about Iran in its April 23, 2024 statement. After Israel struck the Iranian consular building in Damascus and Iran retaliated against Israel, the committee portrayed Tehran as a champion of Palestinian liberation. It praised the Iranian attack’s contribution to restoring deterrence and undermining Israel’s perceived invincibility. Here was a favorable assessment of what the dictatorship’s military power had accomplished. The committee had moved beyond warning against a wider war to welcoming a strategic benefit for Iran.

Tudeh also found an anti-imperialist purpose in supporting Iranian clerical power. Forty-five years later, an American socialist committee was praising the dictatorship’s contribution to liberation.

In 2024, DSA conditioned its national endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on demands including opposition to all funding for Israel, expressly including Iron Dome, and support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. It withdrew the conditional endorsement when the requirements remained unmet and the New York City chapter requested withdrawal. The local chapter continued to endorse her. Iron Dome intercepts incoming rockets. DSA’s demand therefore extended beyond opposition to bombs dropped in Gaza to opposition to American support for a system protecting people from rockets fired at Israel. Concern for civilian life should survive the discovery that some of those civilians are Israeli.

Darializa Avila Chevalier’s path illustrates the connection with campus organizing. She participated in Columbia’s pro-Palestinian activism and helped organize its 2024 encampment as an alumna. NYC DSA and Mamdani endorsed her congressional campaign in 2026. That June, she defended attending the October 8, 2023, Times Square rally where participants celebrated the previous day’s attack. She explained her attendance through concern about Palestinian lives and the anticipated Israeli response. NYC DSA had promoted that rally before walking back its support. Mamdani had not attended. Attendance does not tell us which chants she endorsed. Her defense of the decision still gives voters a question worth asking: why was that gathering, on that day, an appropriate expression of concern for human dignity? People seeking public office routinely ask us to trust their judgment. Their judgment about whom to stand beside is part of the record.

An October 2024 publication from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, presented Hamas and the Houthis as “principally progressive forces,” treating other characteristics as secondary to their role in national liberation. Beliefs and practices that would provoke outrage in an American political candidate become subordinate considerations when attached to a movement fighting Israel. Palestinians who have experienced Hamas’s idea of political freedom might have something to add.

During Gaza’s March 2019 “We Want to Live” demonstrations over living costs and taxes, Hamas authorities detained more than 1,000 people, according to the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, cited by Human Rights Watch. Journalists and human rights workers were among those detained. HRW documented the case of Amer Balousha, an activist and freelance journalist who said prosecutors charged him with opposing the revolution. He was held for nine days, seven in solitary confinement. He had also previously been detained after a Facebook post asking Hamas leaders, “Do your children sleep on the floor like ours do?”

An American socialist might recognize that as a complaint about inequality. Hamas treated its author as a problem to be controlled.

The pattern continued during the war. In May 2025, Amnesty International documented threats, interrogations, and beatings of Palestinian protesters by Hamas security forces. Demonstrators wanted an end to Israeli attacks and displacement; some also demanded an end to Hamas rule. One man described being beaten after protesting and accused of collaboration despite having lost family members in an Israeli strike. His suffering did not protect him from the authorities claiming to represent his people. When activists in America call Hamas progressive, what are they telling these Palestinians? That the people beating them serve a cause more important than their freedom to object? Palestinians do not surrender their rights because an American campus organization finds their rulers politically useful. Supporting them requires taking their complaints about Hamas seriously, including the complaints that complicate a favorite slogan.

Rashida Tlaib addressed DSA’s 2025 convention, and the organization prominently featured her remarks on its convention website. Zohran Mamdani is a DSA member. Ocasio-Cortez has faced its endorsement conditions. Ask them which positions they accept and what would cause them to break with the organization. Membership, endorsement, and a convention appearance are different relationships, each worth examining on its own terms. A movement that demands commitments from candidates cannot reasonably complain when voters demand explanations from them.

Opposition to Israeli aid has also moved deeper into the Democrat Party. In July 2026, 103 House Democrats supported an unsuccessful amendment cutting $3.3 billion in proposed security assistance, while 98 opposed it and ten voted present. The funding question can be debated on its merits. Praise for Iranian military action and descriptions of Hamas as progressive deserve scrutiny in their own right, without being hidden inside the much broader debate over American spending.

Tehran has also tried to exploit American activism directly. In July 2024, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines reported that Iranian actors were posing as activists online, encouraging protests over Gaza, and providing financial support to protesters. She warned that participants might not know a foreign government was involved. Her statement did not identify DSA or a particular politician as a recipient. It did establish that Iran saw an opportunity in the protests and was acting on it. The government being defended abroad was also trying to influence the Americans doing the protesting.

Gallup reported in September 2026 that 65 percent of self-identified Democrats viewed socialism positively, up from 50 percent in 2010. That measures the appeal of an economic and political label, not support for Islamic rule. It shows how receptive the party’s audience has become to the socialist label. Voters attracted by promises about rent, wages, and health care should examine the rest of the package. A promise to lower the rent does not excuse romanticizing a dictatorship.

Freedoms They Demand - Rulers They Excuse

Iran’s latest uprising began on December 28, 2025, after a currency collapse, and spread into demands for an end to Islamic Republic rule. On January 8 and 9, security forces carried out massacres. Amnesty International documented forces firing rifles and shotguns at protesters, frequently targeting heads and torsos. Authorities shut down internet access as the slaughter unfolded. Families searched for relatives while outsiders struggled to determine the scale of the killing.

Iranian authorities acknowledged 3,117 deaths during the uprising. Amnesty reported that UN Special Rapporteur Mai Sato had cited at least 5,000. These figures covered the uprising, not only those two nights, and the full toll remained disputed. Even the government’s own figure described a catastrophe. Amnesty called January the deadliest period of repression in its decades of research on Iran. In footage from an overflowing forensic facility near Tehran, its investigators identified at least 205 distinct body bags. Those were people with families trying to find them, not entries in an argument about American foreign policy.

The government followed the killings with a campaign to silence survivors and relatives. Amnesty documented intimidation surrounding funerals and demands that some families pay money, sign pledges, or falsely describe the deceased as members of the security forces. A family could lose someone and then face pressure to help the authorities lie about the death.

DSA already knew what Iran’s rulers were capable of. In October 2022, its International Committee had condemned arrests, repression, and killings following Mahsa Amini’s death and supported Iranians demanding change.

After the American-Israeli attacks, the national organization described “regime” as a favorite word in the imperialist vocabulary. It framed the confrontation as a continuation of the struggle against Iran since the 1979 revolution and emphasized American responsibility for the conditions provoking Iranian protests. Its statement did not mention the January massacres. It found room to object to the terminology used for the government but no room to describe the government’s recent slaughter of protesters.

Opposing the attacks required no such omission. A person could argue against war and still say plainly that Iran’s rulers had committed mass murder. DSA’s account instead directed the reader back toward American culpability. The people ordering arrests and opening fire became secondary figures in an explanation of conditions supposedly produced elsewhere.

Then came the vigil in New York. In March, organizers reported more than 250 attendees honoring Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor, with candles, flowers, and an altar. They highlighted participation by organizations led by Black, brown, and transgender activists. Endorsers included the Bronx Anti-War Coalition, Workers World Party, and International Action Center.

Khamenei had been supreme leader during the January massacres. Weeks later, American activists were arranging flowers in his honor.

The participants could assemble publicly, denounce their own government, publish an account of their tribute, and go home. Iranians who challenged Khamenei’s authority had been shot in the streets. His American admirers enjoyed the very protection from state power that his opponents were demanding. They were free to choose whom to honor, and this was their choice.

Iran criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity, with death available as punishment for certain offenses, and human rights organizations have documented executions under those laws. The government permits some gender transitions while gay and transgender people face severe abuse and discrimination. Its religious authorities decide which intimate relationships are permissible. No argument about American foreign policy gives those authorities a moral right to control someone’s private life. Americans who insist on personal autonomy should be able to recognize its violation without first checking the government’s position on Israel.

Iranian women have made their demands equally clear. Mahsa Amini died after being detained over her hijab in 2022; a United Nations fact-finding mission concluded that state violence caused her death. Women risked their lives protesting the government’s control over them. They did not need Americans to discover that religious compulsion was oppressive. They needed people who claimed to believe in freedom to take their resistance seriously.

An Iranian woman is not less entitled to choose because her government’s enemies include Washington. Her rights can hardly wait until an American activist has finished explaining imperialism.

By October 2026, the punishment of January’s protesters was still underway. Reuters reported on October 8 that authorities were using coerced confessions, prosecutions, and executions to frighten opponents, identifying at least thirty-four executions connected to the uprising. Surviving the gunfire had not meant escaping the government. The state could come back for people months later, when the crowds were gone and the world’s attention had moved on.

Would Your Allies Let You Disagree?

Before extending solidarity, ask whether the people you are defending would permit you to organize against them. Could you publish an attack on their leaders, reject their religious commands, or live openly in a relationship they condemned? If the answer is no, explain why their power deserves your enthusiasm. An account of everything wrong with America is not an answer to what they would do to you.

Politicians seeking the support of organizations that excuse these rulers owe voters an answer, too. They are asking to be trusted with authority. Their judgment about other people’s use of power is part of their qualification for exercising it themselves. Campaign promises about personal freedom mean less when the candidate treats that freedom as negotiable among political friends.

Iran’s revolutionary left learned what its allies intended by living through it. Today’s admirers have forty-seven years of evidence, including the testimony of women, students, and prisoners who survived. They can also hear Palestinians describe being beaten by Hamas for demanding change. In 2026, they could learn about another mass killing in Iran and still find their way to a vigil for the man who presided over its government.

The Iranians who suffered under those rulers did not have the luxury of looking away. Americans arranging the flowers did. Nobody forced them to bring a bouquet.

Freedom Is Not Self-Sustaining. Neither Is Independent Journalism.

Iran’s revolution offers a lesson that Americans would be foolish to ignore. Freedom can be lost with the enthusiastic assistance of people who claim to defend it.

Exposing that kind of hypocrisy takes research, time, and a willingness to challenge political movements that would rather nobody examined their friends too closely.

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“The thief owns the theft. The institution owns every check written after the warning.”

Minnesota built a program to help disabled and vulnerable people find and keep housing. Before the first claim went out, the state thought it would cost about $2.6 million a year. That estimate did not survive contact with a reimbursement form.

The program paid more than $21 million in 2021, then $42 million, then $74 million. By 2024 taxpayers were at $104 million a year, and another $61 million went out in the first half of 2025 before Minnesota shut the thing down in the middle of a federal fraud investigation.

The state was not buying houses. It was paying people who said they had helped somebody else find or keep one. A house can be walked through. An hour of “housing help” is a line on a form. A large agency cannot sit in every autism session, count every meal, watch every child walk through a daycare door, or ride along on every outreach visit. So it builds eligibility rules, billing codes, and a stack of paperwork. The provider reports what happened, a clerk processes the report, and a check goes out. Anybody who wants to find out whether the service was real usually arrives later, sometimes years later.

This works until somebody notices that the form is easier to produce than the service. At that point the paperwork is the product. Daycare claims say the children attended. Meal claims say the food was served. Autism claims say the treatment happened. Hospice claims say the care was delivered. Housing claims say the assistance was provided. Government sees a document standing in for reality and pays as if the reality were there.

Sometimes the document is the only thing that exists.

Crooks will always look for a weak spot. What I want to know is why government keeps building systems with the same weak spots, and why the checks keep going out after people inside the agency have already started raising alarms. Once the warning is sitting on somebody’s desk, this stops being only a story about the thief. It becomes a story about the people who had the authority to stop paying him and did not.

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Follow the Check, Not the State Color

The fastest way to miss the story is to stop at the map. Find a California case and yell Democrats. Find a Mississippi case and yell Republicans. Point at a Medicare prosecution in Houston and announce that politics is irrelevant because Texas looks red on a cable-news map.

A state does not write the check. An office does.

Texas can elect Republican governors while Austin and Travis County vote overwhelmingly for the Democrat Party. A Houston Medicare case may involve a federal billing code, a private clinic, and a federal prosecutor. An Austin homelessness contract may involve city money, HUD money, a nonprofit, and a city council. Those are different animals. Calling both of them Republican fraud because the governor is a Republican tells you who won the last statewide election. It does not tell you who approved the invoice.

The same rule runs the other direction. Tim Walz did not personally invent every fake meal in Minnesota, and Gavin Newsom does not initial every California payment. Start with the people who designed the program, approved the provider, authorized the money, received the complaint, and had the power to stop payment. Then keep going through the contractor, nonprofit, board, accountant, lawyer, donor, and appointee.

The interesting name is the one that shows up in two scandals the headlines treated as unrelated. Follow that name until the trail stops.

Minnesota Didn’t Get Fooled Once

Feeding Our Future is the case people know, for good reason. The nonprofit sat inside federal child-nutrition programs meant to feed poor children. During the pandemic the operation exploded. Prosecutors described a scheme of about $250 million built on fabricated attendance, fake invoices, shell companies, and meal counts that had little to do with children actually fed.

Founder Aimee Bock was convicted and, in May 2026, sentenced to 500 months in federal prison. If that were the whole story, it would be an enormous crime and nothing else. It is not the whole story.

Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor later found that the Department of Education had received at least 30 complaints about Feeding Our Future or its sites between June 2018 and December 2021. Some were never investigated. Others were investigated badly. In one of the stranger acts of oversight on record, the department asked Feeding Our Future to investigate complaints about Feeding Our Future.

The honor system needed an honor system.

The warning lights were already on before federal agents showed up.

The rest of the backyard looks familiar if you watch the payment instead of the press release. Minnesota was the first state to cover Housing Stabilization Services under Medicaid, at that expected cost of about $2.6 million a year. Within a few years the program was over $100 million.

Prosecutors say providers collected beneficiary information, filed inflated or fake claims, and were paid millions for services they had not provided as billed. By 2026 the Justice Department was using the phrase “fraud tourism” for people traveling to Minnesota to get in on it. Outsiders looked at a state benefit and decided the trip was worth the airfare.

The weakness had a reputation.

Autism billing followed the same curve. Spending and the number of providers soared, while federal prosecutors charged schemes involving kickbacks, unnecessary services, and treatment that was never delivered as billed. A 2026 Justice Department healthcare takedown covered more than $90 million in alleged fraud across Minnesota programs.

By then the pattern was hard to miss: meals, autism, housing, childcare. Different programs, same opening. Get somebody eligible, report activity that is difficult to verify, send in the paperwork, get paid. The label changed, but the opportunity did not.

The Number Nobody Puts in the Headline

When a $250 million fraud breaks, the headline number is $250 million.

The more revealing number is Loss After Notice: how much went out after the government already had a credible reason to think something was wrong?

That is the number I want.

Once inspectors have raised concerns, employees have complained, attendance numbers stop making sense, or an audit has flagged the controls, every new payment belongs to a different story. At that point you are no longer measuring only the thief. You are measuring the office that kept paying him.

Feeding Our Future is the clean illustration. The legislative auditor did not merely add up the theft after the raid. It documented weak complaint handling and weak follow-up while the money was still growing. The criminal owns the lie. The institution owns what it does after the warning.

How many of the billions later labeled fraud were paid after somebody inside the system had already sounded the alarm?

Government is pretty good at adding up the wreckage after the fact. It is much less interested in calculating how much money it kept sending after somebody had already yelled, “Hey, maybe stop.”

That number tells us something the fraud total cannot. It tells us how much damage happened after ignorance was no longer an excuse.

Stopping can also be the move that hurts the employee. After Minnesota began restricting Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit sued and alleged discrimination.

Now put yourself inside the bureaucracy. Approve a doubtful claim today and an auditor may ask about it three years from now. Deny it today and the provider calls this afternoon, a lawyer calls tomorrow, a politician wants to know why a constituent is being hassled, somebody says racism, and your name is in the paper.

No secret meeting is required. If approving the payment is safer than stopping it, the checks will keep going out.

It is also a mistake to count only the cases that end with handcuffs. Criminal fraud is the easy category: somebody lies, government pays, prosecutors prove the lie. Taxpayers also lose money through improper payments, legal spending that buys little, contractors who get rich while the deadline moves, consultants who bill for years, and officeholders who operate inside influence rules the legislature itself wrote.

Nobody has to break a law for the public to get a bad deal.

Failure Can Still Send an Invoice

California high-speed rail belongs in a different category. Here the question is not fake billing for a service that never happened. It is how failure itself becomes something you can keep invoicing.

Voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds in 2008 for a San Francisco to Los Angeles line commonly sold at about $33 billion, with service around 2020 and no ongoing state subsidy for operations.

In the Authority’s 2026 business plan, the optimized estimate for the full Phase 1 line, San Francisco to Los Angeles and Anaheim, was $126.08 billion. A higher re-estimate of the older full scope, without those cost-cutting assumptions, ran around $231 billion.

As of October 2026, after roughly $15.6 billion in program spending, not one mile of operational high-speed track had been laid on the main passenger corridor. Track installation was still scheduled to begin later that year.

The Authority’s own books showed about $15.6 billion spent by August 2026. Roughly $8 billion of that was design-build civil work in the Central Valley: viaducts, embankments, trenches, grade separations. About $1.4 billion was land. Around $1.15 billion went to outside project-management advisors, including firms such as KPMG, Nossaman, AECOM-Fluor, and SYSTRA/TYPSA.

Project development, meaning planning and environmental work, accounted for about $1.75 billion. Track and systems, the part a normal person would call the railroad, was about $136 million. Stations were about $10 million.

Nobody needed to invent 10,000 phantom passengers. Construction firms were paid, engineers were paid, lawyers were paid, project managers were paid, consultants were paid, land was bought, and change orders ran into the billions, including a $537 million amendment in 2026 on top of hundreds of earlier ones.

The California State Auditor had already said this in plain language. A 2018 report concluded that flawed decisions and poor contract management had contributed to billions in overruns and delays. The Authority started Central Valley construction in 2013 without enough land, utility agreements, or deals with other agencies in the way, and it had trouble showing that some large bills were necessary or appropriate.

Audits in 2010 and 2012 had already called the planning and oversight weak. Eight years after the 2018 report, the optimized price was $126 billion and the checks were still going out.

In late September 2026, Governor Newsom vetoed a bill that would have given the rail inspector general more staff and more freedom to hire help, two weeks after that office published another ugly little window into how the project spent money: consultant travel.

The Authority paid more than $2 million in consultant travel over two fiscal years. Of about $1.15 million reviewed, roughly $680,500 lacked required prior approval, and about $540,000 to $590,000 was unallowable under the contracts or travel rules.

The file included premium flights, reimbursement tied to private aircraft, international trips the contracts did not allow, and rides to gyms, a nightclub, an escape room, a tiki bar, and a cigar lounge. Some of it was approved after staff objected, including requests tied to the chief executive.

Compared with the billions already spent, the travel bill is almost comic relief. The larger story is the decade of spending after the state’s own auditors had already documented serious management failures. Call that Spending After Warning.

A project can fail spectacularly at its public purpose and still be a very good business for the people being paid to pursue it.

California gives us another version of the same game: behested payments.

A behested payment is a donation an official asks someone to make for a charitable, legislative, or governmental purpose. There is no general dollar cap. Above a reporting threshold it has to be disclosed. It is not a campaign contribution and it is not a personal gift.

Newsom has used the system more heavily than any California official on record, with more than $340 million in reported solicitations since taking office.

About $4.3 million to $5.1 million of that went to the California Partners Project, founded by his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who does not draw a salary there. She does take about $150,000 a year from a separate nonprofit she founded, the Representation Project, which has also paid her film company.

A 2021 Sacramento Bee review found more than $800,000 to that nonprofit from firms that lobby the administration, including PG&E, AT&T, and Kaiser.

Several Partners Project donors had business in front of the state. The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria gave about $1.8 million at Newsom’s request, including half-million checks in 2024 and 2025 and another $500,000 in March 2026, while tribal gaming compacts and a fight over a rival casino were live.

Blue Shield-related entities gave large sums to causes Newsom requested, including about $20 million in 2020 for a housing program, before the administration gave Blue Shield a no-bid role in the COVID vaccine network, capped around $15 million in expenses it could recover. The company said it would work at cost.

Who asked for the money? Who gave it? Where did it go? What business did the donor have before the state? What happened before the payment, and what happened afterward? Did the same names keep showing up?

In June 2026, the Fair Political Practices Commission fined Newsom $31,500 for filing 18 behested-payment reports late. A federal inquiry involving related nonprofits was also reported that year. By early October, no charges had been announced.

The money does not have to arrive in an envelope under a table.

California created a legal channel for public officials to direct large sums toward outside organizations, including one founded by the governor’s wife, while donors may also have business before the state. Put the money in the right box, file the disclosure, and the relationship becomes part of the system.

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Republicans Built Their Own Versions

Mississippi blew more than $77 million in TANF money through nonprofit intermediaries, political allies, a famous quarterback, and even a volleyball facility. A Republican state auditor eventually went after the money.

That case gives us something useful to compare against Minnesota instead of pretending corruption carries a party registration card.

Mississippi was one patronage network wrapped around one welfare pot. Minnesota was a sequence: meals, autism, housing help, childcare, complaints already in the file, payments still going out, and people from out of state flying in because the billing had a reputation.

California rail is something else again: billions continuing to move through a project long after auditors had documented major management failures. Same treasury, different machines.

Texas is the fair test. A Republican governor does not make Austin, Travis County, Houston, or Harris County Republican institutions.

If social-service fraud inside Texas clusters in Democrat-run cities, counties, agencies, and nonprofit networks, that strengthens the pattern. If it is spread evenly through rural Republican counties and Democrat metros, the pattern gets weaker.

Federal healthcare fraud shows up anywhere a billing code exists. The more specific question is whether the same social-service cascade keeps appearing where Democrats administer the benefits: hard-to-verify services, weak controls, intermediaries between taxpayer and recipient, political resistance when somebody tries to shut the faucet, and more money going out after the warning.

That is what needs to be counted.

The Democrat Party Built the Kind of Machinery Greed Loves

The Democrat Party did not invent greed. It spent decades expanding exactly the kind of government machinery greed has learned to use: open-ended benefits, hard-to-verify services, reimbursement codes, nonprofit intermediaries, grants, contractors, and layer after layer between the taxpayer and whatever taxpayers supposedly bought.

Faced with a social problem, the habit is another program, another grant, another nonprofit partner, wider eligibility, more administrators, more contractors, and often another office to watch the first office. Some of those programs do real good. Every one of them also creates another eligibility decision, another claim, another payment, and another organization standing between the taxpayer and the person who was supposed to be helped.

More transactions create more opportunities to bill. That is arithmetic.

Then politics enters the room. What happens when the providers and nonprofits drawing the money are also part of the political coalition that created the program?

Minnesota gives us a pretty good look. Feeding Our Future turned discrimination into part of the enforcement fight. Suddenly the bureaucrat trying to stop suspicious payments had something to lose personally, while the bureaucrat approving them could push the problem down the road.

Build enough incentives like that into a system and you do not need corruption in every office. You only need people behaving rationally inside a badly designed machine.

The cases in this essay show what happens once that machine is running. The national comparison still needs to be counted, and Texas gives us a clean place to start. If the same architecture produces the same failures under Republican local control, the argument gets weaker. If the pattern continues clustering inside Democrat-run social-service systems, the argument gets stronger.

Either way, count it.

The people exploiting these systems are often less mysterious than the coverage makes them sound. They read the manual.

What gets reimbursed? What paperwork is required? Which claims almost nobody checks? How many auditors are there? How long does an investigation take? Which appeal buys six months? Which legal theory makes a supervisor nervous? Which nonprofit structure qualifies for money a business could not get directly?

The capable operator does not have to fight the agency. He has to know which form makes the agency mail him the money.

Those skills travel. A person who can manufacture attendance understands reimbursement. A recruiter who can produce nominal clients can do it in the next program. An accountant who knows which file survives review can serve more than one provider.

Headlines put scandals in separate boxes because cases have docket numbers. People do not stay in the boxes.

A shared bookkeeper tells me more than a shared ethnicity ever will.

That is the connection worth following.

The Warning Is the Story

Thieves, contractors, grant writers, and political operators are not going away. Government cannot repeal greed. It can decide how easy it is to turn greed into a business, and it can decide what happens once the warning is already sitting in somebody’s inbox.

Minnesota priced a housing program at $2.6 million a year and watched it climb to $104 million. Feeding Our Future piled up complaints before federal agents ever arrived. California’s rail authority had been warned for years about bad decisions and weak contract management while the price climbed past $126 billion and the trains still did not run. Mississippi pushed welfare money through nonprofits until a Republican auditor demanded more than $77 million back.

Who got the money? Who ran the office that paid it? Who kept showing up around the contracts? When did somebody in authority know something was wrong, and how much went out after that?

That last number is the one I want to see on every government fraud investigation from now on.

Loss After Notice.

How much money went out after the warning?

Somebody approved the provider. Somebody signed the contract. Somebody read the audit. Somebody received the complaint. Somebody watched the spending blow past the estimate and kept paying anyway.

Finding the thief is only half the investigation.

The other half begins when government knew.

Follow the money down to the institution that actually wrote the check.

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“Some people will forgive you for destroying your life before they forgive you for deciding you deserve a better one.”

I know Black Americans who live in nicer houses than I do. From the image some of them project, you would think they had grown up fighting for survival in Compton. They have room to build a comfortable life, yet the streets still get cast as the model for how to live it.

One of my former neighbors, a suburban mother I regarded as a good parent, posted about Austin Metcalf’s fatal stabbing. She expressed sympathy for those affected, then added, “that boy shouldn’t have put his hands on Karmelo.” That comment stayed with me because of who made it. Here was a woman raising children in comfortable surroundings, reaching for the language of provocation to explain a confrontation that ended in death. You do not have to live in a dangerous neighborhood to absorb its rules about respect and retaliation.

This goes well beyond teenagers. Adults carry those expectations into subdivisions, workplaces, churches, and small towns. A higher income can change what someone owns while leaving his judgment untouched. By ghetto culture, I mean the habits that reward intimidation, retaliation, contempt for responsibility, and hostility toward achievement. Black Americans have fought them for generations. But when defending those habits becomes a test of Black identity, the person trying to build something better gets treated as a traitor.

What happens when the address improves and the expectations don’t?

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When Dysfunction Becomes Identity

There is a difference between ordinary respect and compelled deference. Ordinary respect allows you to disagree with me, correct me, or tell me to stop bothering other people. Compelled deference requires you to handle me carefully because I might make you regret doing otherwise. Under those rules, a request to lower your voice becomes a challenge and a supervisor’s correction becomes humiliation. Walking away makes you weak. Escalating establishes that nobody gets to play with you. The people around you have to decide how much trouble they are willing to endure just to ask for ordinary consideration.

Elijah Anderson described this street code in neighborhoods where people fear victimization and distrust the police. A reputation for retaliation can offer protection there. He also distinguished families committed to work, school, and conventional responsibility from those oriented toward the street. Decent families still had to navigate the rules enforced around them.

A dangerous neighborhood does not make everybody in it eager to behave dangerously. Some are trying to escape. Others are helping make escape necessary. Yet the code can acquire authority over both groups: speak differently and you think you are better than everybody; refuse a confrontation and you are soft; take school seriously and you are “acting white.” Someone else gets to decide which handicaps you must keep to prove you belong. That is where the street code becomes Cancer Culture. A destructive practice gets protected as identity, and the argument turns from what it costs to whether its critic is Black enough.

How the Culture Travels

Thomas Sowell argued in Black Rednecks and White Liberals that some habits presented as distinctly Black had earlier versions among Southern whites and, before that, in parts of Britain. He traced belligerence, sensitivity to insult, and disregard for education across groups and generations. Under his account, rural communities can retain older local honor traditions while absorbing modern urban versions. Suburban families can import the street image through music, phones, classmates, relatives, and parents. These are different routes into the same problem, and neither requires a child to grow up on a dangerous block.

The culture can arrive on a screen. An adult can adopt it as readily as a teenager.

Charis Kubrin’s 2005 study examined 403 songs from gangsta rap albums released between 1992 and 2000. She documented how lyrics presented the street code, including violence used to establish reputation and identity. The study examined the messages in the songs, not whether listeners became violent. But we can still ask what is being offered for admiration. Describing danger is one thing; presenting retaliation and criminal status as achievements gives the audience something to imitate. A kid in a subdivision can adopt the pose without having endured the conditions that produced it.

Parents decide what they praise, what they excuse, and what they refuse to tolerate. Moving away from danger while continuing to glorify the conduct that sustains it leaves the job unfinished. A safer neighborhood gives children an opportunity. What happens inside the house helps determine whether they can use it.

The Everyday Costs

At work, this attitude gets expensive fast. If every correction becomes disrespect, somebody has to manage your reaction before he can manage the work. Miss shifts, arrive late, and leave coworkers covering your responsibilities, and you give people a reason to avoid depending on you. Discrimination, limited skills, and scarce jobs can obstruct employment. Starting a confrontation over an ordinary instruction adds an obstacle of your own. Calling the boss racist on the way out does not settle whether he was, and it certainly does not settle the rent. Your household gets the bill when the paycheck disappears.

The rest of us encounter the same demand for accommodation outside work: phones on speaker, arguments staged for an audience, confrontations filmed as entertainment. Strangers become unwilling participants. When somebody finally asks for consideration, the person causing the disturbance announces that he has been disrespected.

Remember Ebonics? In December 1996, Oakland’s school board adopted a resolution recognizing it as students’ primary language and declaring that African language systems were “not a dialect of English.” The resolution also called for students to master English. In January 1997, the board revised its wording and explicitly emphasized moving students from their home language patterns toward English proficiency. That was its objective. The test of the approach is what students actually learned: could they leave school able to speak and write effectively where formal English was expected?

Recognizing a child’s home dialect can be part of teaching him. Using cultural respect to excuse failing to equip him is a disservice. Teaching standard English gives him another skill, and calling it “acting white” pressures him to surrender an advantage to satisfy people who will never reimburse him for the opportunities he loses. The same practical judgment applies to dress. A bonnet, pajamas, and house shoes may be comfortable at home. If the workplace requires something else, put on something else. An employer asking you to arrive dressed for the job should not have to negotiate whether getting dressed compromises your Blackness.

Then there is the contradiction about safety. If you chose a neighborhood because it was safer, why teach your children that its white residents are the principal danger? Discrimination deserves attention when there is evidence of it. A neighbor’s race alone tells you nothing about whether he threatens your family. Parents should teach children to recognize dangerous conduct, including conduct committed by people who look like them.

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When Achievement Becomes Betrayal

“Acting white” turns useful skills into evidence of racial disloyalty. A student trying to earn good grades gets asked whether he has forgotten who he is. Apparently, he owes the group a performance before he owes himself an education. Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli found that the relationship between high grades and peer popularity differed across groups. The pattern they associated with “acting white” was stronger in schools with more interracial contact and absent in predominantly Black schools and private schools. Their measure was peer popularity, but the finding challenges the assumption that an integrated setting automatically removes pressure over Black authenticity.

I have already written about an Army friend who grew up poor in the Bronx, wanted something better, and took pride in his discipline and appearance. Rejecting the street style helped make him an outsider among people who thought it defined Blackness. He owed them no apology for wanting a better life.

There is also the temptation to defend a flattering story instead of examining the results. Consider “Black women are the most educated group in America.” In Pew Research Center’s analysis of 2024 data, 38 percent of Black women ages 25 to 34 held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 52 percent of white women and 77 percent of Asian women of the same ages. Black women outpaced Black men, at 26 percent. Beating Black men and leading the country are different claims. Inventing national first place helps nobody finish the next semester.

Politics supplies another racial loyalty test. In May 2020, Joe Biden told Charlamagne tha God, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” He apologized that day. In 2021, Black columnist Erika D. Smith criticized Larry Elder’s policies and described his candidacy as “an insult to Blackness.” These examples show how disagreement can become a challenge to someone’s identity. A candidate is entitled to argue for your vote. He is not entitled to decide whether you remain Black if you refuse.

The people who encourage achievement give a child room to reject those demands. Their standards can come from a stable two-parent household, a demanding single mother, a Black church, an immigrant family, or military discipline. Homework, self-control, responsibility, and respect for learning have no racial owner. What matters is having adults who enforce those expectations when peers pressure a child to abandon them.

The Adults Who Keep It Alive

Adults keep the code alive when criticizing it becomes more socially dangerous than excusing it. Challenge the conduct and the conversation moves to your motives. Are you racist? Do you hate yourself? Who are you trying to impress? Meanwhile, the behavior that started the argument gets another pass. Sowell argued that influential people helped preserve harmful expectations by presenting them as authentic Black culture and condemning efforts to change them. That arrangement lets people claim moral credit for defending a culture while other families absorb its costs.

Children notice the rules adults actually enforce. Say fighting is wrong, then arrive with an excuse every time your child fights, and he knows which lesson to believe. Praise education, then laugh when someone mocks a child for sounding white. A teacher or pastor who attacks reasonable correction as racial hostility teaches that responsibility is negotiable whenever identity enters the discussion.

Eventually, consequences arrive that a parent cannot argue away. Defending a child from every correction can help preserve the very behavior that puts his future in danger. The adults congratulating themselves for protecting him ought to ask what they are preparing him to do.

Who Pays for It

Metcalf was fatally stabbed at a Frisco track meet on April 2, 2025. Karmelo Anthony was convicted of murder in June 2026 and sentenced to 35 years in prison. A judge denied his request for a new trial on August 22; his lawyers said they would appeal. What I heard in my former neighbor’s comment was the street emphasis on provocation: somebody crossed a line and should have known what could happen. In a discussion about a dead teenager, that emphasis deserves scrutiny. What are adults teaching children about the meaning of a confrontation and the acceptable response to it?

As a parent, I want a child to get home alive. I want him to keep his hands to himself, control his temper, and recognize when walking away protects his future. A rule that makes restraint humiliating puts him under pressure at precisely the moment he needs judgment. The audience cheering his toughness will not serve his sentence or rebuild the family of somebody killed.

There are quieter bills, and people who reject the code pay those, too. A coworker covers another missed shift. A decent parent tries to maintain rules that relatives undermine. A child who wants to study gets ridiculed by people whose approval matters to him. Too much of the discussion centers on the feelings of the person demanding accommodation, as though everyone else exists to absorb his behavior. The people carrying his burdens have feelings, families, and futures of their own. Their restraint should not be mistaken for consent to keep paying.

What Deserves Defending?

Black Americans have traditions of education, faith, military service, enterprise, and family responsibility worth defending. The people sustaining them should not have to prove their authenticity to somebody who treats confrontation as a credential. They are building things their children can inherit. A parent owes a child preparation for a life he can sustain: accepting correction, finishing difficult work, disagreeing without threatening people, and making political decisions without asking permission to remain Black.

If your version of authenticity makes a child harder to employ, easier to provoke, and afraid to distinguish himself through achievement, examine what you are asking him to preserve. He will inherit the costs long after the people congratulating him have moved on.

Buying a safer house is an achievement. Keeping destructive rules alive inside it undermines the life you worked to provide. Defend the standards that help your children grow, and stop granting harmful behavior authority over who they are allowed to become.

Leaving the ZIP code is not leaving the code.

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“Am I supporting the thing I say I value, or am I waiting for somebody else to pay for it?”

Over the weekend, I sent a shorter version of that question to my free subscribers. It was meant as a simple fundraising email, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the idea was bigger than my Substack and worth expanding a little.

If you already pay $8 a month, $80 a year, or $1,200 a year, this is not for you. Thank you. I mean it. You’re already helping make the work possible, and I appreciate it.

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A lot of the people who read my work hate socialism

They believe people should work, contribute, pay their own way and take responsibility for themselves. They especially dislike arrangements where one group carries the cost while somebody else gets the benefit. I agree, which makes the economics of independent media kind of funny: a few people pay for it while everybody gets to consume it.

Reading a free Substack is not literally socialism. Nobody has nationalized my laptop. The point is simpler. A relatively small group pays for something a much larger group gets to use.

Economists have a term for the underlying problem: the free rider problem. When people can receive a benefit without paying for it, each person has an incentive to let somebody else cover the cost. That can work for a while, but if enough people make the same decision, eventually there may not be enough paying customers left to support the thing everybody enjoys.

Independent media runs into a version of this problem all the time. The internet made information incredibly cheap to distribute, but it did not make it free to produce. Some essays take a few hours. Others have me digging through government reports and databases, checking numbers against original sources and rewriting an argument because one piece of evidence changed what I thought I knew. The internet makes the finished article cheap to deliver. It doesn’t make the work required to produce it disappear.

Once the finished piece exists, however, letting one more person read it costs almost nothing. Readers understand that arrangement pretty well.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in December 2025 found that only 16 percent of American adults had directly paid or given money to a news source during the previous year through a subscription, membership or donation. Eighty-three percent had not. Pew also found that only 8 percent of Americans believe individuals have a responsibility to pay for news at all.

The local-news numbers are even more revealing. Only 12 percent of Americans said they had paid or given money to local news in 2025. Among those who had not, half said the main reason was that they could find plenty of local news for free. Another 29 percent simply weren’t interested enough to pay, while 10 percent said it was too expensive and 9 percent said the news wasn’t good enough.

That 29 percent matters. If you don’t care enough about something to pay for it, fair enough. I’m not trying to convince someone to finance work he doesn’t value. I’m talking about the people who clearly do value it and keep coming back for more.

Free is a hell of a price.

That brings me back to this publication. I have about 2,400 subscribers, and roughly 200 of them are paid. In other words, only a little over 8 percent pay. By coincidence, that’s almost exactly the percentage of Americans Pew found who believe people have a responsibility to pay for news.

I’m not complaining about the arrangement. I created it. I could put everything behind a paywall tomorrow, but I don’t want to. If somebody is broke, unemployed, on a fixed income, young, struggling or just having a lousy year financially, I still want that person to be able to read what I write.

Some readers have also supported me through Venmo, Buy Me a Coffee and individual donations instead of becoming paid subscribers. Some have done it more than once, and I appreciate every one of them. Sharing my work matters too because it helps me reach people I could never reach on my own.

But there is a difference between free and costless. Sharing helps spread the work. It does not finance the work that produced it. Free does not mean nobody paid. It means the cost landed somewhere else.

That is where the personal-responsibility part gets interesting. If I believe people should support the things they value, why should that principle disappear the moment I discover somebody else is willing to pay for me?

There is no coercion here. Nobody is taxing you, reaching into your paycheck or sending you a bill because you read three essays last month. You decide whether the work is worth supporting. This is voluntary.

People also say they want independent media. They complain about corporate owners, advertisers, wealthy benefactors, political organizations and governments having too much influence over what they read. Sometimes those complaints are justified and sometimes they aren’t, but the basic economics never go away.

I don't want to be a billionaire.
I don't even want to be a millionaire.
I want to change things.
Starting with us.

Independent media costs money. Somebody has to pay the writer, reporter, researcher, editor or whoever else is doing the work. There is no mysterious fifth source of money that appears because everybody agrees independent media is important.

If readers do not provide enough support, the money has to come from somewhere else. It may come from advertisers, wealthy owners, institutions or from the person producing the work continuing to subsidize it himself. None of those arrangements automatically corrupts the product, but every source of money comes with its own interests and incentives.

Reader support has one enormous advantage: the people financing the work are largely the same people who value and consume it. The relationship is remarkably simple. I produce something you think is worth reading, and enough of you decide it is worth helping me continue to produce it.

Convincing people to do that is difficult. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that only 17 percent of people across the 20 wealthier countries it tracks had paid for online news during the previous year. Reuters says payment rates in most markets appear stuck between roughly 10 and 20 percent.

Of course people prefer free. So do I. If two gas stations across the street from each other sell the same gas and one charges $3 a gallon while the other charges nothing, I am probably not stopping at the first one because I want to teach myself a lesson about capitalism.

Human beings respond to incentives. The interesting part comes later, when the free gas station looks around and asks who is going to pay for the gasoline. Independent media eventually has to ask the same question.

If you read me once every six months, I’m not talking about you. If you genuinely cannot afford a subscription, I’m not talking about you either. Keep reading.

But if you read almost everything I publish, send essays to friends, share them on social media, argue with me, agree with me, laugh at something I wrote, get pissed off at something I wrote and then come back a few days later to see what the hell I wrote next, you’ve already answered one question.

The work has value to you.

Which leaves the harder one:

Am I supporting the thing I say I value, or am I waiting for somebody else to pay for it?

Right now, about 200 people are helping pick up the tab for everybody else. I’d like to make it 300 by finding 100 more people willing to support the thing they say they value.

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“We spent generations fighting racial double standards, then created a new one and called it culture.”

Imagine a principal sitting in his office after another classroom incident. He knows what happened. He knows the school rule, and he knows what punishment the same conduct would normally bring. But there is another number sitting in front of him too: the racial breakdown of suspensions.

So he hesitates. The behavior has not suddenly become acceptable, and the other students are not safer if he ignores it. But enforcing the rule may make the racial numbers look worse, and somewhere along the way the racial numbers themselves became part of the problem. The hesitation does not stay in the office. It shows up later as a dropout, a beating, or a body.

Most Black Americans do not live by the destructive street code described below. But culture does not stop at neighborhood lines. Ideas about respect, retaliation, toughness, authority, and what it means to back down can travel far beyond gangs and high-crime neighborhoods without everyone who absorbs pieces of them becoming a criminal.

The great irony of modern race relations may be that, after generations of fighting against lower expectations imposed on Black Americans by racism, some of America’s most influential institutions began imposing lower expectations in the name of fighting racism. As legal discrimination declined, schools, universities, government agencies, media institutions, and other cultural authorities increasingly treated unequal outcomes as possible evidence of unequal treatment. That made it harder to criticize or punish some of the behaviors producing those disparities without wandering into a racial minefield.

In some cases, destructive subculture itself became entangled with racial identity. Criticizing the behavior could be portrayed as criticizing Black people, while some of the behavior itself could be defended as authentically Black. This did not create every problem in Black America, but it amplified some of the worst ones by turning accountability into prejudice and normal standards into racial controversy. The people supposedly being protected from judgment were never protected from consequences. Black Americans themselves have often paid the highest price.

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The Part of the Timeline Nobody Wants to Explain

There is something peculiar about the history of Black America that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.

Slavery was brutal. Slave marriages had no dependable legal protection. Husbands and wives could be separated, and children could be sold away from their parents. The National Park Service estimates that between 1820 and 1860, approximately 30 percent of enslaved children born in the Upper South were taken from their families and sold into the Deep South. Yet Black Americans worked hard under slavery to keep family ties intact, and after emancipation many traveled great distances trying to find relatives from whom they had been separated.

Slavery had the legal power to tear Black families apart, yet Black Americans repeatedly fought to preserve them. A century after emancipation, with slavery gone and Jim Crow collapsing, the Black family began deteriorating at a rate slavery itself had never managed to accomplish as a voluntary pattern.

We do not have modern household surveys for enslaved Americans, and a child being forcibly sold away from his mother is obviously not the same measurement as a modern one-parent household. But look at what happened after slavery.

In 1960, 67 percent of Black children lived with two parents. Only 21.9 percent lived with one. By 1970, the two-parent figure had fallen to 58.5 percent. In 1980 it was 42.2 percent, and by 1990 it had reached 37.7 percent. The one-parent figure moved in the opposite direction, rising to 54.8 percent by 1990.

That did not happen because slavery came back, and Jim Crow was not expanding either. These changes accelerated during the same broad period in which America’s legal racial barriers were being torn down.

Poverty adds another wrinkle. Census data put the Black poverty rate at 55.1 percent in 1959. By 1964, the Census category then reported as “Negro and other races” was at 49.6 percent. The categories are not perfectly identical, but the direction was already down before most of the Great Society machinery was in place.

Those numbers do not tell us what caused the later family collapse. They tell us the standard explanation is incomplete. If slavery and Jim Crow are enough to explain today’s Black social problems, why did some important measures deteriorate so dramatically after slavery had been gone for generations and Jim Crow was finally being defeated?

Something else happened too.

What Got Worse?

In 2024, 63 percent of Black children lived in what the Annie E. Casey Foundation defines as single-parent families, compared with 23 percent of White children. Its definition includes children living with an unmarried parent even when a cohabiting partner is present, so this is not an apples-to-apples continuation of the 1960 Census series.

In the same 2024 data, 27 percent of single-parent families were below the federal poverty line, compared with 6 percent of married-couple families. Some of that relationship runs the other way because higher-income and better-educated people are also more likely to marry and remain married. The difference remains enormous.

Then there is violence. In 2023, the Black homicide victimization rate was 21.3 per 100,000 people. The White rate was 3.2. Black Americans were being murdered at more than six times the White rate.

Much violent crime is intraracial, as it is among Whites. That changes the moral picture. When violent street culture takes hold in a Black neighborhood, the main victim is usually not some white guy living fifty miles away. It is another Black person trying to live there.

Education and employment show persistent gaps too. NAEP continues to report substantial racial differences in academic performance. In 2024, fourth-grade math scores for Black students improved from 2022, but large group differences remained.

In August 2026, the seasonally adjusted Black unemployment rate was 6.0 percent. The White rate was 3.7 percent.

These outcomes have more than one cause. The question is why culture and behavior became increasingly difficult to discuss as part of the answer.

When Equal Treatment Became an Unequal-Outcome Problem

The civil-rights principle most Americans understand is simple: the rule should not change because of your race.

A Black child should not be punished more severely than a White child for the same behavior. An employer should not reject someone simply because he is Black. A court should not impose a different standard of justice because of skin color.

Then another idea gained considerable institutional power. If the same rule produced sharply different racial results, the result itself could become evidence that something was wrong with the rule or the way it was being enforced.

In January 2014, the Obama administration’s Departments of Education and Justice issued a Dear Colleague letter on school discipline. Part of it addressed cases in which similarly situated Black and White students were disciplined differently.

But the guidance went further. It said a policy could create a federal civil-rights problem even when it was neutral on its face and “administered in an evenhanded manner” if it produced an unjustified disparate racial impact. Significant racial discipline disparities could also become part of the basis for a federal investigation.

Put yourself in the principal’s chair. The school rule says fighting brings suspension. Nothing in it mentions race, and you believe you are applying it fairly. But Black students are being suspended at a much higher rate than White students.

Maybe you have a discrimination problem. Look for it. But what if the behavior itself is not occurring at the same rate?

The administrator is no longer thinking only about what Jaquavious did. He is thinking about what Jaquavious’s punishment does to the spreadsheet.

That is where equal rules and equal outcomes start pulling in different directions.

The 2014 guidance said research suggested the large racial disparities then appearing in federal data were not explained by more frequent or serious misbehavior among students of color. Critics challenged that conclusion and warned that schools would respond by managing suspension numbers. Either way, racial outcomes had explicitly become part of the federal discipline framework.

Then Washington changed direction several times. The 2014 guidance was rescinded in December 2018. The Biden administration issued a new student-discipline resource in May 2023 dealing with racial discrimination, though it did not simply reinstate the old letter. That resource has since been rescinded. In February 2025, the Education Department issued a Dear Colleague letter directing federally funded institutions to cease using racial preferences and stereotypes in sanctions and discipline. That directive was later vacated by a federal court, and by February 2026 the Department had agreed not to rely on it. On July 23, 2026, the Department announced it was rescinding several disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations.

Forget which administration you like and look at the problem facing the school. A racial disparity can be evidence of discrimination. It can also reflect differences in behavior, circumstances, reporting, discretion, or several of those at once. If an institution decides in advance which explanation is morally acceptable, it has stopped investigating and started protecting a narrative.

Policing presents the same tension in a more dangerous setting.

I have been pulled over plenty of times. My rule is simple. Keep my hands where the cop can see them. Don’t start digging underneath the seat. Don’t scream, threaten anybody, or physically resist. If the officer is wrong, the shoulder of the highway is a remarkably stupid place to conduct the trial.

A 2020 study examining nearly 100 million traffic stops found that Black drivers made up a smaller share of stops after sunset, when their race was harder to see, and that Black and Hispanic motorists appeared to face lower thresholds for vehicle searches. The researchers interpreted those patterns as evidence of racial bias. But even they acknowledged that racial differences in overall stop rates can also reflect differences in driving behavior and time spent on the road. With equipment violations such as broken taillights or expired registration, researchers often do not even know whether the underlying violation rates are the same.

Behavior during the encounter affects what happens too. Roland Fryer’s police-use-of-force study found significant racial disparities in nonlethal force. In the shooting data he examined, he found no racial difference, either in the raw data or after accounting for context. That does not settle every police shooting in America, but population percentages alone tell us very little about what happened during an individual encounter.

Police can treat Black citizens unfairly, and citizens can turn an already tense encounter into a far more dangerous one. Someone does not deserve to get shot because he is obnoxious, frightened, angry or stupid. But predictable and justified are not synonyms.

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When Ghetto Culture Became Black Culture

Somewhere along the way, America began confusing a destructive street subculture with authentic Black culture.

Sociologist Elijah Anderson described a “code of the street” in which respect, toughness, retaliation and avoiding the appearance of weakness take on enormous importance. Later research has found connections between adherence to street-code beliefs and violent behavior. Under that system, an insult can become something that has to be answered because refusing to retaliate makes a person look weak.

That is a cultural norm, not melanin.

The problem begins when criticizing the norm gets confused with criticizing Black people themselves. The kid glorifying violence can somehow look “authentically Black,” while the kid spending Saturday with a textbook ends up being accused of acting White.

Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli found racial differences in the relationship between academic achievement and popularity in their student data. The effect grew among high achievers and in schools with more interracial contact, but disappeared among students in predominantly Black schools and private schools.

The pattern moved with the school. That is enough to kill the idea that it is baked into Blackness.

Black immigration offers another useful contrast. Immigrants are not a random sample. Even so, the spread inside the Black population is huge.

Pew reported in 2026 that 35 percent of Black immigrants age 25 and older had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2024. Among Nigerian-born Black immigrants, the figure was 67 percent.

So when somebody says “Black culture,” I want to know which one. Do they mean the Nigerian doctor? The Baptist grandmother who hasn’t missed church in thirty years? The father working two jobs and telling his son to pull his damn pants up? The Black kid catching hell because he actually did the reading assignment? The business owner who closes early because somebody got shot around the corner last week?

Or do they mean the guy ready to stomp somebody into the pavement because he “looked at him wrong”?

They may check the same racial box on a government form. That does not make them culturally interchangeable.

Perhaps nothing was more insulting to Black America than deciding its worst behavior was its most authentic behavior.

Popular entertainment did not invent gangs, street violence, fatherlessness or instant gratification. But it learned how to package some of that imagery, sell it, imitate it and make a fortune from it. An existing street aesthetic acquired cultural prestige, and once that aesthetic became tangled up with racial authenticity, criticizing the behavior became much harder.

Amplification, Not Original Sin

Welfare rules may have affected marriage incentives. Crack devastated already fragile neighborhoods. Deindustrialization wiped out many jobs for men without college degrees. Incarceration removed huge numbers of men from communities. Marriage declined throughout American society, not only among Blacks.

People make choices too. Black Americans are not pieces being moved around a board by White politicians. They have agency, which means they can make smart decisions, stupid decisions and everything in between, exactly like everyone else.

Small consequences are often how people learn. Your teacher throws you out of class. Your father chews you out. Your coach benches you. Your boss tells you to get your shit together before he has to replace you. These are not catastrophic events. They are information.

Take away enough of those small consequences and the lesson does not disappear. It gets more expensive. One day the teacher is an employer. The principal is a police officer or judge. What could have cost you an afternoon eventually costs you a job, a criminal record, a marriage or years of your life.

Life has no disparate-impact office.

Who Paid the Highest Price?

This is what bothers me most about the whole thing. The bureaucrat studying suspension statistics probably does not have to spend fifth-period algebra next to the kid screaming at the teacher. Another Black kid often does.

The academic explaining street violence through structural forces probably does not hear gunfire outside his daughter’s bedroom at two in the morning. A family living in that neighborhood does. The people with the most sophisticated explanations are frequently insulated from the behavior they are explaining.

The 2023 Black homicide rate of 21.3 per 100,000 is not primarily a statistic about White suffering. Those are Black sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, friends and neighbors who are dead.

Calling that compassion does not make it compassion.

It does not help the kid trying to learn in a chaotic classroom. It doesn’t help the mother trying to keep her son away from the street. It does nothing for the Black business owner trying to keep good employees and customers in a deteriorating neighborhood.

And it certainly does not help the millions of ordinary Black Americans who live by the same basic standards of civilized behavior everyone else does, yet continually find themselves racially associated with people who don’t.

When people inside the same racial category have radically different outcomes, we should probably spend less time treating race as destiny and more time asking what else differs between them.

The Same Standards

What I am arguing for is simple: stop changing expectations according to race.

If fighting brings a three-day suspension, the same fight should bring the same suspension. If the rule is stupid, change it for everybody. A lateness policy does not become racist simply because one racial group violates it more often.

Dress codes are another obvious example. If I showed up to work wearing six-inch fake nails, enormous eyelashes, and a bonnet, my boss would probably wonder what the hell happened to me. Partly because I am a man, admittedly. But even if I were a woman, an employer might reasonably decide that some of those choices do not fit the workplace. The standard does not become racist because employees of one race violate it more often. If a rule is reasonable, enforce it equally. If it is unreasonable, change it for everybody.

Murder, robbery, assault, classroom disruption, abandoning children, and intimidation do not become healthy behaviors because historical injustice exists.

If a Black student and a White student do the same thing and the Black student receives the harsher punishment because he is Black, deal with the discrimination. If police are searching Black motorists on less evidence, deal with that too.

A disparity can expose unequal treatment. It can also reflect unequal behavior or circumstances. The worst approach is deciding which explanation is compassionate before looking at the evidence.

For generations, racism told Black Americans that they could not meet the same standards as White Americans. Then parts of supposedly enlightened America came dangerously close to telling them they should not have to. Those messages sound very different, but they share an ugly assumption: both begin by expecting less.

Racism once denied Black Americans equal treatment because they were Black. Racial paternalism risks denying them equal expectations for the same reason. The intentions changed. Reality did not.

Institutions can suspend judgment. They cannot suspend consequences.

Don’t Lower the Standard

This essay took hours of digging through Census tables, federal discipline guidance, crime statistics, academic research, policing studies, and decades of social data.

Those hours have to come from somewhere. Right now, many of them come out of the time I spend doing other work.

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“If liberal policies are really that popular, why do they become so much harder to advertise when everybody gets a vote?”

James Talarico’s pastor may have accidentally provided the perfect introduction to his 2026 Senate campaign.

Reverend Babs Miller is a minister at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, where Talarico has been a longtime member. In undercover footage published in September, Miller discussed the increasingly moderate positions Talarico has taken while running statewide in Texas. She said she could “guarantee” that once he was elected, he would “change his tune back to where he was.” She also said his campaign had convinced him to back away from transgender issues because the Democrat Party was doing the same, and that his staff was encouraging him to follow along “just for the next 50 weeks.” Miller said she thought it was bad advice, then added, “if it helps him win, okay.”

That is one hell of a sentence to have your own pastor caught saying during an election.

The timing makes it more interesting. Talarico is not merely polishing his biography or changing the subject. Several positions and statements that followed him from the Texas Legislature have changed as his audience expanded from a legislative district to the entire state.

In 2021, Talarico opposed Republican restrictions on transgender student athletes and argued that “some things are more important than perfectly fair competition in sports.” During the same legislative debate, he made his now-famous statement about six sexes. On September 9, 2026, Talarico went on Fox News, said there are two sexes, acknowledged that he had “missed the mark” with earlier comments, and said he would oppose transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports “if it endangers safety or fairness.” The Texas Tribune called the sports position a reversal and noted that the Fox appearance came as Talarico sought support from right-leaning Texas voters.

But notice the escape hatch built into the wording. Talarico did not say males should never compete in girls’ sports. He said he would oppose it if he believed safety or fairness were endangered. That leaves plenty of room later to argue that a particular case does not cross that threshold and that no promise was ever broken.

The conversion arrived on schedule. Statewide voters were now in the room.

The politicians change, the issues change, the states change, and the props certainly change. But the incentive is remarkably durable. A candidate establishes a recognizably liberal record, survives the Democrat primary, and then discovers that independents, suburban parents, working-class voters, gun owners, energy workers, rural voters, and people who voted Republican last time also get ballots.

That is when the wardrobe starts changing. The sheriff appears in the commercial. Somebody finds a rifle. Border security becomes important. Manufacturing becomes sacred. Police sound useful again. “Progressive” starts disappearing while “common sense,” “fairness,” and “bipartisan” suddenly get a workout.

If this happened once, it would be meaningless. When the same maneuver appears across decades, candidates, states, and issues, the timing becomes part of the story.

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When the Electorate Changes, So Does the Message

Kamala Harris provided a nearly perfect national example in 2024.

When Harris was running for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2019, she was asked whether she supported banning fracking. Her answer was not remotely ambiguous: “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” During that same campaign, she also supported decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings.

Five years later, Harris was no longer competing for progressive primary voters. She was the presidential nominee, and Pennsylvania mattered enormously. Now she opposed banning fracking. On illegal border crossings, she said the laws had to be enforced and “there should be consequences.” CNN described both as shifts from positions she had taken during her earlier presidential run.

Dana Bash asked Harris what had changed. Harris repeatedly answered that her “values have not changed.” In 2019 she favored banning fracking. In 2024 she did not. Her stated values remained the same while the policy and the electorate changed.

Barack Obama offers an older variation. In 1996, he said he favored legalizing same-sex marriage. During his 2008 presidential campaign, he publicly defined marriage as between a man and a woman. After reaching the White House, he eventually supported same-sex marriage. David Axelrod later wrote that political considerations had influenced Obama’s earlier public position; Obama disputed Axelrod’s account and said his views genuinely evolved.

You can argue about the explanation. The chronology does not move: support before the national race, opposition while seeking the presidency, support after reaching the White House.

Apparently evolution has excellent timing.

The broader point is not that every change of position is fake. Politicians change their minds. Voters are supposed to influence them. The more revealing question is why the same kinds of positions keep becoming inconvenient at the same stage of the election cycle.

Strategic Ambiguity

Abigail Spanberger demonstrates something subtler because campaigns do not always need a clean reversal. Sometimes careful ambiguity works just as well.

During her 2025 campaign for governor of Virginia, Republicans attacked Spanberger over transgender students, bathrooms, and girls’ sports. Her response emphasized safety, parents, local communities, and her experience as the mother of three daughters. In one prominent ad, she said she was concerned about children’s safety and argued that schools should trust parents and local communities. The Washington Post reported that she did not mention the transgender issue specifically in that ad, and later described her as vague when pressed on Youngkin’s restrictive transgender policies, saying those questions should be left to local communities.

The voter hears “three daughters.” The voter hears “safety.” The voter hears “parents.” The campaign does not have to finish the sentence.

Spanberger won. In July 2026, her administration withdrew a Youngkin-era rulemaking effort that would have restricted transgender students’ participation in female sports and their use of certain sex-separated facilities. There was no public announcement when the rulemaking was withdrawn. Spanberger later said her administration had consulted the attorney general’s office and determined that the Board of Health lacked legal authority to impose the regulation.

Nobody had to break a clear promise because no categorical promise had been made. That is what makes strategic ambiguity useful. The campaign supplies the comforting words. The voter supplies the conclusion.

The General-Election Costume Closet

Political packaging can be even more obvious when the issue is image rather than policy.

John Kerry had a real military record. He served in Vietnam, was decorated, and later became nationally famous as an antiwar veteran. When he ran for president in 2004 during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however, his general-election advertising heavily emphasized the combat service and barely mentioned the antiwar activism that had helped launch his political career. FactCheck.org explicitly noted that Kerry was de-emphasizing that part of his résumé while courting more centrist voters.

Then Kerry walked onto the Democrat National Convention stage, saluted, and announced, “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.”

Nothing about his military service was fabricated. That misses the point. A campaign does not need to invent a man when it can edit him. Forty years of biography go into the cutting room, and voters get the thirty seconds most useful in November.

Joe Manchin entered his 2010 West Virginia Senate race after previously saying he was “totally behind” health-care reform. As the race tightened, CBS reported that he began walking back that support and distancing himself from Washington Democrats. Then came the advertisement in which Manchin picked up a rifle and shot the cap-and-trade bill.

Manchin later spent years showing that much of his moderation was genuine. He repeatedly broke with his own party in office. That gives us a useful control: sometimes the guy holding the rifle really does mean it.

But look at what campaigns repeatedly decide is worth showing voters.

Claire McCaskill’s own campaign told Missouri voters that she was “not one of those crazy Democrats.” Jon Tester, running for reelection in Montana after Trump had carried the state by more than twenty points, opened his campaign by emphasizing legislation Trump had signed and later bought full-page newspaper advertisements thanking Trump for signing Tester-backed measures.

Tim Ryan had spent almost twenty years in Congress as a Democrat and had even run for the Democrat presidential nomination. During his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign, one of the messages he wanted voters to remember was, “I voted with Trump on trade.” PolitiFact found the claim substantially accurate.

The facts were real. The selection was the story.

A politician may have thousands of votes, hundreds of speeches, and twenty years of history. A campaign has thirty seconds. It decides which thirty seconds of that life the voter gets to meet.

That tells us something important about the incentives. Campaigns do not randomly choose sheriffs, rifles, factories, border enforcement, police, manufacturing, and Trump-signed legislation to reassure swing voters. They choose the parts of a candidate’s record they believe will travel best outside the electorate that nominated him.

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When the Record Won’t Stay Buried

Then there is Abdul El-Sayed, where the problem is no longer merely selective packaging.

During the defund-the-police debate in 2020, El-Sayed repeatedly supported the concept. Bridge Michigan found interviews and social-media posts in which he endorsed defunding, while explaining the term as shifting money away from policing and incarceration and toward education, health, recreation, housing, and other services.

Years later, while pursuing a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, El-Sayed told The Detroit News, “I actually never, never called for defunding.” Bridge Michigan went back through the record and reached a wonderfully uncomplicated conclusion:

“He did.”

El-Sayed argues that his earlier remarks require context. That context tells us what he meant by defunding. It cannot make the word disappear.

“I believe that we do need to defund the police” and “I actually never, never called for defunding” are not two nuanced descriptions of the same statement. At some point, words have to survive their own recording.

That is the difference between ordinary campaign editing and something much harder to explain away. Kerry really served. Ryan really voted with Trump on trade. Tester really had legislation signed by Trump. El-Sayed’s problem is that the old sentence and the new sentence are sitting next to each other.

We Have the Tape

Which brings us back to Talarico.

His earlier record exists. His current positions exist. His pastor’s comments now exist. The Texas Tribune independently describes his sports position as a reversal, and Talarico himself acknowledges that he “missed the mark” with some of his previous statements.

And sitting underneath this debate is a number campaigns would be foolish to ignore.

Pew surveyed American adults in February 2025 and found that 66 percent favored laws or policies requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams matching the sex they were assigned at birth. Only 15 percent opposed them, while 19 percent chose neither.

Campaign professionals can read polls. That number tells us something concrete about electoral incentives: a position can be welcomed by part of a party’s activist base and become a liability once the electorate broadens.

That is why Miller’s video matters so much in the Talarico case. According to her account, campaign advisers had encouraged him to back away from transgender positions temporarily, and she predicted that he would “change his tune back” after winning. She even supplied the line that could almost serve as the subtitle to this entire essay: “I think it’s bad advice personally, but if it helps him win, okay.”

What matters now is chronology. What did the politician say before statewide voters were paying attention? What did he vote for before consultants started sanding down the edges? What suddenly became “common sense” when independents showed up? And what survives once the ballots have been counted?

Watch that sequence long enough and the scenery becomes familiar. The sheriff appears, the rifle appears, the factory appears, and Donald Trump’s signature appears. Border enforcement, domestic energy, law enforcement, manufacturing, military toughness, fairness, safety, and bipartisanship suddenly move toward the front of the brochure.

Sometimes the moderation survives the election. Manchin shows that it can. Sometimes the politician is merely highlighting genuine parts of a complicated record. Kerry, Tester, and Ryan illustrate that. Sometimes a campaign avoids telling voters exactly what they would rather not hear. Spanberger illustrates that. And sometimes somebody says one thing when an idea is fashionable and later says he never said it at all. El-Sayed gives us that one almost word for word.

The categories are different. The electoral incentive running through them is not.

The pattern tells you what campaigns believe can survive a primary and what they believe can survive a general election. Liberal politicians do not suddenly feature rifles, border sheriffs, police, manufacturing, domestic energy, and Republican cooperation because those things became aesthetically fashionable in October. Those are the messages their campaigns repeatedly decide are useful when voters outside the progressive base become decisive.

If liberal policies are as popular and persuasive as their advocates insist, there remains an uncomfortable question underneath all of this: why do those policies so often become harder to advertise when everybody gets a vote?

Why the sheriff? Why the rifle? Why the sudden affection for border enforcement, domestic energy, police, manufacturing, military toughness, and Republican cooperation?

If the product is really that good, why does the packaging keep changing before Election Day?

Talarico’s old positions are on the record. His new positions are on the record. His pastor’s prediction is on the record too.

This time, nobody has to rely on memory.

We have the tape.

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I would rather spend those hours doing this.

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“We were told we were exporting democracy. Are we also importing future Democrat voters whose political culture we spent decades helping shape?”

Beginning in 2025, USAID was effectively taken apart. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that more than 80 percent of the agency’s programs had been canceled after a review of roughly 6,200 contracts. By July, USAID had stopped implementing foreign assistance as an independent agency, with the remaining functions moved under the State Department.

Then the left started having a remarkably bad run in Latin America.

In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa defeated leftist Luisa González by more than a million votes in the April 2025 runoff. In Honduras, the ruling leftist LIBRE party finished a distant third in the November 2025 election, and conservative Nasry Asfura eventually won with 40.3 percent of the vote after weeks of delays, technical problems, and fraud allegations.

In Peru, conservative Keiko Fujimori narrowly defeated leftist Roberto Sánchez in June 2026 after one of the closest elections in the country’s history. The final count gave Fujimori 50.135 percent to Sánchez’s 49.865 percent. Then Colombia elected right-wing political newcomer Abelardo De La Espriella over leftist senator Iván Cepeda. De La Espriella ran on security, lower taxes, deregulation, and a smaller state, while Cepeda represented a continuation of much of President Gustavo Petro’s political project.

There are plenty of ordinary reasons elections swing back and forth. Crime, inflation, and corruption can all move voters. Bad presidents can manufacture opposition victories all by themselves.

Correlation is certainly not causation. I know that. You know that. But read the rest of this and you tell me.

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What Were We Paying For?

When most Americans hear foreign aid, they probably imagine sacks of grain, childhood vaccines, malaria nets, wells, disaster relief, or food being unloaded from a military transport plane somewhere miserable. USAID absolutely did those things. That is partly what made the rest of the operation so easy to ignore.

I downloaded the government’s own ForeignAssistance.gov data and started digging through USAID obligations. The usable files covered fiscal years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2024, 2025, and partial 2026. Fiscal 2025 began in October 2024, months before USAID was dismantled, so that year naturally contains substantial activity. The 2026 records need a little more explanation. After USAID stopped independently implementing foreign assistance in July 2025, ForeignAssistance.gov continued recording legacy and transferred USAID-funded activity, including programs moved under the State Department, carryover obligations, deobligations, and other accounting adjustments. In other words, the 2026 file does not mean USAID was still operating normally. The 2023 export repeatedly returned a null file, so I excluded that year.

I also used obligations, not disbursements. An obligation is money the government legally commits to spend. It is not necessarily the same as cash already paid.

Then I narrowed the records to seven political and civic categories: democratic participation and civil society, human rights, media and free flow of information, legal and judicial development, elections, anti-corruption organizations, and legislatures and political parties.

Those seven categories alone produced approximately $2.5 billion in USAID obligations to NGOs during the six usable years. About $1.21 billion went toward democratic participation and civil society. Roughly $537 million went toward human rights. Nearly $359 million went toward media and the free flow of information. Legal and judicial development accounted for about $166 million, elections about $98.5 million, anti-corruption organizations roughly $75.6 million, and legislatures and political parties about $45.7 million.

I went back through those same six yearly files and totaled all obligations managed by USAID, not just the political and civic categories. They came to roughly $150.6 billion.

That makes the $2.5 billion NGO subset about 1.7 percent of all USAID obligations in those same usable files.

So no, politics was not most of USAID. Not even close. USAID was an enormous agency doing everything from health care and agriculture to food assistance and disaster relief. But 1.7 percent of $150.6 billion is still about $2.5 billion, and this was the portion specifically operating inside civil society, human rights, media, elections, courts, anti-corruption work, legislatures, and political parties.

I did not audit the other 98.3 percent, so I am not giving it a clean bill of health. It may contain perfectly legitimate aid, waste, fraud, ideological spending, or all four. I simply did not examine it.

That does not prove $2.5 billion went to the left. It proves something much simpler. American foreign aid was spending billions of dollars inside the civic and political systems of foreign countries.

This was not a malaria program accidentally bumping into a politician.

We were funding elections, political-party development, media, advocacy groups, labor organizations, judges, civil-society networks, legislatures, political participation, public-policy work, and organizations whose entire purpose was influencing how societies were governed.

Not Democracy. Their Democracy.

Some democracy promotion is exactly what it sounds like. Teach people how elections work. Protect secret ballots. Train poll workers. Help election commissions count votes accurately. Teach political parties how to comply with election law. Help journalists report without being murdered. Fine.

Then you read USAID’s own documents.

In 2014, USAID published a 79-page toolkit on integrating LGBT rights activities into programming in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. One section dealt specifically with political participation.

The toolkit described efforts to increase LGBT participation in political parties and election campaigns, including as candidates. It discussed training delivered by the Washington-based Victory Institute to LGBT candidates, elected officials, and political-party officials. The training covered campaigning, social media, direct mail, and canvassing.

The document went further. It noted that “more progressive political parties,” including Greens and Social Democrats, might be willing to incorporate LGBT rights into their party platforms. USAID and its partners, the toolkit suggested, could help develop those platforms and the materials used to promote them.

This is the United States government discussing taxpayer-financed assistance that could help foreign political parties incorporate a particular social issue into their political platforms. You can support LGBT rights and still understand what just happened.

We are no longer talking about teaching somebody how to operate a voting machine.

The toolkit even suggested measuring how many LGBT people trained through programs later became political candidates and whether LGBT issues appeared more frequently in party platforms.

The National Democratic Institute, one of the major organizations operating throughout the USAID democracy ecosystem, has likewise described programs intended to increase political participation among LGBTQ people and other groups it considers underrepresented. NDI has also discussed social and behavioral change approaches designed to shift norms and behaviors that influence political life.

Those are political and social objectives. They contain judgments about which groups need more power, which norms should change, which identities deserve greater institutional protection, and what a healthier society should look like.

USAID was not merely exporting democracy. It was often helping define what democracy was supposed to become.

And ideology does not always arrive wearing a campaign button. Sometimes it arrives through vocabulary: inclusion, equity, gender, marginalized communities, information integrity, social norms, civil society, human rights, resilience.

Each term can describe a legitimate concern. Over time, institutions can also build political assumptions into the definitions. Nobody inside the system needs to wake up thinking, Today I will advance the left. The vocabulary may already have done most of the work.

You can sincerely believe you are standing in the political center while the center has quietly moved a mile to your left.

Before somebody throws CubaNet or the International Republican Institute at me, yes, USAID funded them too. There were anti-communist programs, religious-freedom programs, and plenty of work that does not fit neatly into a left-wing box. I get to those later, because the question is not whether exceptions existed. They did. The question is what the broader pattern looked like and whether anything comparable existed on the other side.

Follow the Money

Then I wanted to know where the money went.

Within those political and civic categories, approximately $1.65 billion in USAID obligations went to organizations classified in the federal data as U.S.-based NGOs.

That is not all foreign aid. It is not even all USAID spending. It is the narrower political and civic slice described above.

The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening, usually called CEPPS, received roughly $218 million in the analyzed data. Freedom House received about $148 million. Internews received approximately $109 million. Winrock International received around $78 million. The Pan American Development Foundation received about $69 million. East-West Management Institute received roughly $67 million.

Global Communities received approximately $61 million. Counterpart International received about $50 million. The Solidarity Center received approximately $41 million. The Asia Foundation and IREX each received around $39 million, while the National Democratic Institute received roughly $25 million directly in the subset I analyzed.

Not every organization on that list is formally partisan. But using the broader definition in the chart, most lean left based on their issue priorities, institutional language, labor affiliations, or social-policy agenda. CEPPS and Freedom House are better treated as mixed or bipartisan. The labels describe ideological orientation, not formal party membership.

A substantial portion of American political and civic foreign assistance first traveled through organizations headquartered right here in the United States.

Another roughly $433 million in the U.S.-NGO subset appeared in my export with the recipient name redacted.

Redaction proves nothing sinister by itself. There can be good reasons to protect organizations working in dangerous countries.

It does make following the money harder, especially when the first recipient is often not the last.

Open Air Money Laundering

USAID awards money to a large NGO. The NGO funds regional organizations. Those organizations support local civil-society groups. Those groups finance training, advocacy, media, labor organizing, research, campaigns, or additional partner organizations.

The first transaction is easy to follow. By the fifth, you start wanting aspirin.

CEPPS itself is a consortium whose major partners have included NDI, the International Republican Institute, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. Freedom House’s USAID-funded Human Rights Support Mechanism operated through a larger consortium and multiple implementing partners.

Internews works through media partners and subgrants. East-West Management Institute has run grant programs. Counterpart uses local grants. IREX uses subawards. The Solidarity Center works with unions and labor organizations throughout the world.

None of that is inherently improper. Large international programs need local partners. But the public trail gets messy in a hurry.

In 2025, the Government Accountability Office examined 3,680 single-audit findings involving federal prime recipients with subrecipients. Thirty-six percent, or 1,332 findings, primarily involved incomplete subaward reporting, inadequate subrecipient monitoring, or failures to verify eligibility.

GAO said those weaknesses can make it difficult to determine where subaward money is ultimately spent. The federal grant system had rules and audits. What it did not always have was a clean public trail all the way to the bottom.

Money does not become politically irrelevant because it took four legal hops before somebody spent it.

The Receipts

USAID obligations in the data for a Ukrainian program called Responsive and Accountable Politics totaled roughly $41 million. The work involved political parties, democrat actors, electoral processes, and representation.

In Venezuela, tens of millions went into civil-society strengthening and participation programs intended to strengthen independent organizations and democratic governance. Other programs worked with democratic political parties, universities, think tanks, media, diaspora organizations, and civil-society voices.

That makes perfect sense if your foreign-policy objective is weakening Nicolás Maduro. It is also politics.

In Tunisia, roughly $18.5 million went to a political-transition program involving electoral institutions, civil society, media, and government officials. Programs in Jordan sought to strengthen civil society and digital media while increasing citizen engagement and advocacy.

USAID-backed programs in Colombia taught NGOs policy analysis, government oversight, coalition building, and advocacy. A Honduran anti-corruption organization received about $1.76 million, while another civil-society and media program trained NGOs, journalists, and academics to analyze government data and hold officials accountable.

Some of that sounds excellent. Government accountability is a good thing. American tax dollars used to strengthen organizations that pressure foreign governments are still affecting politics.

Then there were the openly ideological programs.

In Guatemala, approximately $746,000 went toward a gender-affirming health program that included strengthening transgender-led organizations, advocacy, gender-affirming services, and economic opportunities.

In Honduras, USAID money reached SOMOS CDC, an LGBT organization involved in political participation and advocacy. The net obligation I found was around $190,000 after a deobligation, meaning USAID later reduced part of the amount it had previously committed. Program materials discussed youth political participation, advocacy toward the National Congress, and engagement with political-party benches.

In Peru, USAID-backed democracy programming brought together political and social actors, media organizations, journalists, activists, and regional stakeholders for political dialogue and civic participation. International IDEA says one USAID-funded political-dialogue project carried a $7.5 million award and worked across at least 16 Peruvian regions. The project ran from June 2023 through December 2024.

East-West Management Institute ran a USAID-funded rapid-response grant program in Georgia that said grants could support initiatives to “expose and limit” malign influence from far-right and Russia-funded groups.

Russian influence in Georgia was a genuine national-security concern. But American taxpayer money was nevertheless available to civil-society organizations to reduce the influence of political groups characterized as far-right or connected to Russia.

Call it good politics if you want. It is still politics.

The Information Machine

Then there is the increasingly fashionable business of deciding what information people should trust.

Searching the obligations for explicit disinformation programs turned up roughly $24.6 million across about eleven core activities in the usable years.

That is not every program touching media or information integrity. It is the smaller set where the language was explicit enough to classify confidently.

Uganda had a media-viability initiative worth about $4.5 million. A youth-resilience program in North Macedonia was also around $4.5 million. Latin America had programs such as CREDIBLE and VOCES. Guyana had a project specifically aimed at reducing disinformation. Ecuador had Ecuador Verifica. Central Asia had an information-integrity program.

Internews and IREX accounted for a large share of these explicit obligations.

Stopping deliberate propaganda can be legitimate. Russia lies. China lies. Political parties lie. Governments lie. Activists lie. People on the Internet lie before breakfast.

But disinformation gives somebody considerable discretion over what deserves suspicion. That gets more uncomfortable when organizations policing the information environment are also part of an ecosystem promoting particular social priorities.

Internews, for example, has published a Gender Equality and Inclusion Strategy that discusses gender-transformative approaches intended to change gender norms and power relationships.

I am not saying Internews journalists fabricated stories. I am saying the organization has an institutional worldview.

People do not stop having political assumptions because their business card says democracy.

The Conservative Dog That Barely Barked

USAID also funded things conservatives would support.

CubaNet, an independent Cuban media organization strongly opposed to the Communist regime, received USAID money. So did the International Republican Institute. There were religious-freedom programs, anti-Maduro organizations in Venezuela, election monitoring, independent journalism, anti-corruption work, and organizations operating against authoritarian governments.

Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation even appears in the data.

CubaNet, IRI, religious-freedom programs, anti-Maduro groups. Those are real too, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Now look for the equivalent on the right.

Where is the USAID toolkit helping pro-life political candidates run for office? Where are the federal programs helping conservative parties insert traditional-family policies into their platforms?

Where are the taxpayer-funded NGOs training activists to campaign for lower taxes, deregulation, gun rights, parental rights, smaller government, or restrictions on abortion?

I could find occasional religious-freedom and market-oriented programs. I could not find anything resembling the institutional scale devoted to LGBT political participation, gender, labor organizing, selected identity groups, advocacy, and social-norm change.

And USAID itself published a toolkit saying that “more progressive political parties,” including Greens and Social Democrats, might incorporate LGBT rights into their platforms and that USAID and its partners could help develop those platforms and outreach materials.

USAID was not exclusively left-wing. What is much harder to find is anything comparable in scale devoted to exporting conservative social and economic ideas.

That is the asymmetry.

They Were Warned

None of this started with Elon Musk. Republicans were raising questions years ago.

In January 2017, Senator Mike Lee asked the State Department about USAID programs in Macedonia and their relationship to organizations connected to George Soros’s Open Society network.

A few months later, Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, Jim Inhofe, Thom Tillis, David Perdue, and Bill Cassidy wrote Secretary of State Rex Tillerson alleging that U.S. government money, including USAID funds, was being used in Macedonia and Albania in ways that benefited left-leaning political interests.

Those were allegations, not proof.

The concern eventually reached USAID’s Office of Inspector General, which examined safeguards against political bias in democracy programs.

Its 2019 audit is worth reading because both sides can quote it. The Inspector General said it did not identify instances of partisanship affecting the programs reviewed. But the same report also said weaknesses in USAID’s acquisition and assistance process and outdated policy could unintentionally expose programs to bias. It recommended expanding the range of organizations eligible to implement political-party assistance and reviewing USAID’s Political Party Assistance Policy.

The report also documented a case in Georgia. CEPPS, through NDI and IRI, attempted to suspend assistance to a Georgian political party partly because of disagreement with the party’s platform and rhetoric. USAID’s mission intervened and ordered that the assistance continue.

In that case, the safeguard worked. But the concern was hardly imaginary. Two major U.S.-funded democracy organizations had reached the point of trying to deny assistance partly because they objected to what a political party believed.

The 2019 audit may simply have been answering a narrower question than the one we are asking. The Inspector General looked for prohibited partisan favoritism. But if USAID officially defines LGBT political participation, gender transformation, selected forms of inclusion, labor rights, information integrity, and particular advocacy priorities as legitimate democracy work, an implementer pursuing those objectives is simply following policy.

Nobody has to falsify anything. The ideology can disappear inside the institutional definition of neutrality.

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Where the Hell Were the Republicans?

Republicans do not get to walk away clean from this.

USAID did not operate only under Democrat presidents. Republican presidents administered it. Republican Congresses appropriated money for it. Republican senators sat on committees overseeing it. Republican-appointed ambassadors worked with it. The International Republican Institute participated in its democracy programs.

So where were they?

Some of it is history. During the Cold War, supporting democratic parties, independent media, labor movements, dissidents, civil society, and anti-communist organizations was not crazy. The Soviet Union was actively financing political movements and governments around the world.

If Moscow was funding communists, Washington was going to finance people opposing communists. The machinery remained after the Soviet Union disappeared, while the definitions kept expanding.

Democracy promotion became civil society. Civil society became inclusion. Inclusion expanded into gender and sexual identity. Media assistance became information integrity. Human rights acquired increasingly specific social doctrines.

Generations of Republicans continued voting for the appropriations, perhaps because nobody wanted to be the congressman accused of cutting food for starving children.

That may be the greatest trick in the foreign-aid system.

Put the humanitarian program and the ideological program under the same moral umbrella. Question the agency and somebody puts a sick child on television.

Progressives finding ways to use government money for progressive objectives is not particularly mysterious. Republicans repeatedly helping finance the machinery is harder to explain.

Maybe many never looked closely. Maybe they liked the foreign-policy leverage. Maybe the amounts were too small individually to attract attention. Maybe the vocabulary sounded harmless.

Or maybe conservatives made the same mistake they have made in universities, media, nonprofits, corporate HR departments, and cultural institutions for decades.

They ignored the plumbing because they were busy arguing about the paint. Then one day they turned on the faucet and discovered somebody else had been controlling the water pressure for thirty years.

Elon Musk Opens the Books

DOGE did one thing Washington had managed to avoid for decades. It made millions of people ask:

What are we actually paying for?

Foreign aid quickly became one of the first major targets. The Trump administration froze large parts of the system. Contracts were reviewed. Programs were canceled. Staff were laid off or placed on leave. Rubio later said more than 80 percent of USAID programs were terminated, with the remaining foreign-assistance functions moving into the State Department.

Supporters of USAID described the move as reckless destruction, and sometimes they had a point. Programs involving food, medicine, disease prevention, refugees, and emergency relief were disrupted along with everything else. Tearing apart a sprawling bureaucracy so quickly was always going to cause collateral damage.

DOGE wasn’t above scrutiny either.

By July 7, 2026, its Wall of Receipts claimed approximately $110.3 billion in savings across canceled contracts, grants, and leases.

GAO later found serious weaknesses in the methodology. For grants, DOGE did not provide enough information to verify the method behind roughly 96 percent of the claimed savings. It also found that identifying information was missing for thousands of contracts, including all 3,506 USAID contracts then listed on the Wall of Receipts.

The missing identifiers do not prove those grants or contracts were improper. But they certainly had the effect of muddying the water. The less identifying information attached to an award, the harder it becomes for outsiders to figure out exactly what was canceled, who received the money, and whether the claimed savings were real. Whether that was incompetence or something more deliberate, the records alone cannot tell us.

The bigger change was cultural. Americans suddenly started asking what was buried inside agencies they had spent decades ignoring.

USAID turned out to contain considerably more politics than mosquito nets.

When the Checks Stopped

Then organizations dependent on American foreign-aid money started shrinking.

Freedom House said the 2025 aid freeze and subsequent terminations eliminated more than 80 percent of its programs and activities across more than 140 countries. Staff cuts and program closures followed.

The effects were not abstract. Funding disappeared, staff were cut, grants vanished, partnerships ended, and organizations that had built their operations around American assistance suddenly had to function without it.

That is what happens when money disappears. Staff shrink, subgrants vanish, local partners lose resources, media programs contract, training ends, coalitions weaken, and organizing capacity declines.

None of that tells us who would have won an election had the money continued. But if funding has no political or institutional effect, why spend the money in the first place?

If civil-society grants do not strengthen civil society, stop funding them. If political-participation programs do not increase participation, cancel them. If labor programs do not strengthen unions, they are failures.

The whole justification for these programs is that money changes institutional capacity.

Take away enough money and the ecosystem gets smaller.

That is not ideology. It is arithmetic.

The Latin American Laboratory

Now go back to the countries that first caught my attention.

Within the narrow political and civic NGO categories I analyzed, USAID obligations totaled roughly $32.2 million in Honduras, $13.9 million in Peru, $12.9 million in Colombia, and $8.4 million in Ecuador during the usable years.

More than $67 million across those four countries.

Those are not total USAID expenditures. They are the narrower political and civic NGO subset.

The evidence is stronger in some countries than others.

Colombia gives us perhaps the clearest picture of what the funding shock actually looked like on the ground.

In March 2025, Reuters reported that the USAID suspension was shuttering programs around Colombia. The country had been receiving as much as $440 million a year through more than 80 USAID programs. One youth-resilience program that provided education, mentorship, and alternatives to gangs was forced to close operations. Officials warned that other programs involving peacebuilding, coca substitution, human rights, and vulnerable communities were also at risk.

It is not proof that those organizations were campaigning for Iván Cepeda. Some of the programs being cut were designed to reduce gang recruitment, drug production, and violence. That complicates any simplistic political story. The same funding shock could weaken progressive civil-society organizations in one place while weakening anti-crime programs somewhere else.

Honduras also had USAID-funded programs aimed directly at civil society and political participation, including work involving youth advocacy, public institutions, and engagement with political actors. SOMOS CDC, one of the organizations appearing in the USAID records I reviewed, describes political participation and advocacy as part of its work.

What I cannot show cleanly is that every one of those specific political programs disappeared permanently before the Honduran election. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Peru offers another piece of the picture.

International IDEA ran USAID-funded work designed to bring political and social actors together across at least 16 regions, collaborate with national and regional media, promote democratic values, and strengthen political dialogue. One USAID-funded political-dialogue project carried a reported $7.5 million award and ran through the end of 2024. International IDEA also describes broader work in Peru involving political institutions, activists, journalists, excluded groups, and political participation.

But this is exactly where dates matter. A program that ended in December 2024 cannot honestly be described as a 2025 DOGE cancellation.

The same caution applies to Ecuador. USAID certainly funded political, civil-society, and information programs there. But some specific programs discussed elsewhere in this essay had already ended before USAID was dismantled.

So the four countries do not give us a clean laboratory experiment.

Then elections happened.

In Honduras, the ruling LIBRE candidate finished third and conservative Nasry Asfura ultimately won. The election itself was messy, with technical failures, delayed counting, manual review, and fraud accusations from losing parties.

In Ecuador, Noboa’s victory came in a country where drug violence and security were enormous political issues. His government had made cracking down on gangs central to its agenda.

In Colombia, De La Espriella ran explicitly as a law-and-order candidate. Reuters described weak economies and rising crime as major forces reshaping voter priorities across Latin America, while De La Espriella promised tougher action against crime, tax cuts, and expanded oil and gas activity.

Peru was extraordinarily close. Fujimori ultimately finished with 50.135 percent of the vote, only about 49,600 votes ahead of Sánchez out of more than 18 million votes cast.

Those domestic factors could explain a great deal of what happened.

Crime, economic conditions, corruption, unpopular governments, and weak candidates can all move elections.

The question I am interested in is whether the sudden loss of American-funded institutional capacity also mattered at the margins.

The infrastructure existed. American taxpayers financed it. We can document organizations losing money, employees, programs, and reach when the funding stopped. What nobody can tell us is exactly how much political weight that capacity carried.

By September 2026, the broader regional change was difficult to miss even in Washington.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled through Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru during a three-country swing involving governments increasingly aligned with the Trump administration. He promised expanded security cooperation with De La Espriella, sought another $45 million in security funding for Noboa’s Ecuador, and visited Fujimori as Peru announced plans to join the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas anti-drug coalition.

That happened after the elections, so it tells us nothing about what caused them. It does show how dramatically the political landscape had changed.

Now reverse the countries. If China spent years pouring money into American NGOs, media organizations, labor groups, political-participation programs, advocacy networks, and party-development projects, then abruptly stopped funding them before a major political shift, would American journalists shrug and tell us the money could not possibly have mattered? Not a chance. We would lose our minds.

What happens when the United States spends decades trying to shape political culture abroad, and then millions of people from those societies migrate to the United States?

Apparently it becomes harmless democracy promotion only when the left does it.

The Evidence That Cuts the Other Way

CubaNet is the cleanest example of why this is not a simple story.

USAID obligations of roughly $1.2 million supported an independent Cuban media organization hostile to the Communist regime.

IRI, the Republican-affiliated counterpart to NDI, participated in USAID political programs. USAID supported religious freedom, opposition to Maduro, independent election administration, anti-corruption work, and journalism in authoritarian countries.

USAID’s Political Party Assistance Policy, at least on paper, required equitable treatment rather than using assistance to engineer election results.

And in the Georgia case discussed earlier, USAID itself stopped implementing partners from withholding assistance because they objected to a party’s platform.

The agency was enormous. Different missions did different things. Different administrations had different priorities. Thousands of employees and contractors were involved.

There was never one giant room where everybody put on a Che Guevara shirt and planned world socialism before lunch. That would actually be easier to expose.

Institutional ideology is usually more boring. It develops through hiring, vocabulary, professional norms, grant criteria, acceptable research, approved partners, and definitions nobody questions because everybody in the room already agrees with them.

So I am less interested in finding a cartoonishly incriminating memo than in asking what the system repeatedly funded.

USAID sometimes supported goals conservatives would applaud. What is much harder to find is anything comparable in scale devoted to exporting conservative social and economic ideas.

That is the asymmetry.

What We Actually Know

I don’t need to make this story bigger than the records allow.

USAID financed elections and political-party development, civil-society advocacy, organized labor, media programs, identity-based political participation, and projects intended to alter social norms.

Its own 2014 toolkit contemplated training LGBT candidates and helping progressive political parties incorporate LGBT rights into their platforms.

The political and civic NGO records I examined contain roughly $2.5 billion in obligations even with 2023 missing, including approximately $1.65 billion to U.S.-based NGOs.

That $2.5 billion represented about 1.7 percent of all USAID obligations in the same six usable files. So this was not most of USAID. It was a comparatively small slice of a huge foreign-assistance apparatus, but a slice operating specifically in elections, civil society, media, political participation, legislatures, courts, human rights, and advocacy.

Large organizations frequently passed federal money farther downstream, while government auditors documented weaknesses in subaward reporting and monitoring that can make federal money harder to trace to its ultimate destination.

I found no evidence in these records of USAID money being paid directly to Democrat candidates, campaign committees, or the Democrat Party. A nonprofit employee making a personal political contribution is not the same thing as federal grant money being transferred into a campaign.

Republican lawmakers were asking questions about ideological bias years before DOGE. USAID’s Inspector General later reported finding no partisanship affecting the democracy programs it reviewed, while the same audit identified vulnerabilities to bias and documented an episode in which major implementing partners tried to withhold assistance partly because they disagreed with a foreign political party’s platform.

Then Trump returned to office, Musk and DOGE started tearing through the spending, and USAID was dismantled.

Programs disappeared. Staffs shrank. Subgrant pipelines were severed. Foreign civil-society organizations, media operations, political programs, and advocacy networks lost American money.

A striking rightward political shift also continued across Latin America. Reuters described the 2026 victories in Colombia and Peru as part of a broader reversal of the region’s earlier leftward “pink tide,” while also pointing to crime and weak economies as major voter concerns.

Nobody can tell you exactly how many votes years of American-funded civil society, media, labor, advocacy, and political-participation programs were worth. But the opposite claim is just as lazy: that because the effect is hard to measure, it must have been zero.

Governments do not spend billions strengthening organizations because they believe money has no effect. They do it because money buys capacity: staff, training, media reach, organization, and influence.

At this point, treating the possibility of political consequences as some fringe conspiracy theory is getting harder to defend.

The surprising thing is that Washington spent decades expecting taxpayers to believe the infrastructure was not political.

Maybe the timing really was one enormous coincidence. Maybe abruptly removing American money from foreign NGOs, advocacy groups, labor organizations, media operations, political programs, and civil-society networks had absolutely nothing to do with any of the political changes that followed.

Maybe.

But “coincidence” is doing an awful lot more work now than it was before we followed the money.

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This essay meant digging through government databases, audits, grant records, NGO reports, program descriptions, election results, and enough federal bureaucracy to make a sane person close the laptop.

I would rather spend those hours doing this.

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“Socialism rarely arrives announcing where it intends to end. It arrives incrementally, one soul at a time.”

In 1992, the Democrat Party platform proudly declared, “We believe in free enterprise and the power of market forces.” It called business a noble endeavor and said renewed American prosperity required private investment.

By 2025, Gallup found that 66 percent of Democrats viewed socialism favorably. Only 42 percent viewed capitalism favorably. In 2010, the two were essentially tied among Democrats.

That is one hell of a change in thirty-three years.

My friend Jimy has been emailing around a seven-point document called Why You Should Vote Republican. He goes after socialism, illegal immigration, big government, affordability, election integrity, mandates and individual freedom.

What I like about Jimy’s approach is that he doesn’t spend half the document apologizing before making his point. He looks at the country, looks at the two parties and tells you exactly what concerns him. And he’s right!

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His first concern is socialism.

Now, Democrats telling Gallup they view socialism favorably does not mean they all want to nationalize Ford and seize the neighborhood bakery. People use the word socialism to mean different things.

An actual socialist organization is considerably less fuzzy.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s 2026 program says its enemies include the “entire global system of capital.” It calls for drafting a new constitution and creating a “democratic socialist republic.” It says complete victory will require “building a new society from the ground up.” Elsewhere, it calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, abolishing the Senate and replacing the president and Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress.

That is not Medicare negotiating the price of Lipitor.

Socialism and communism are not technically identical. The historical relationship between them, however, is hardly imaginary. Marxist-Leninist theory treated socialism as the lower stage on the road toward communist society. Democratic socialism later developed along different lines and generally rejected Soviet-style dictatorship.

My shorthand is considerably less academic:

Socialism is communism lite.

America is not going to wake up one Tuesday morning with hammer-and-sickle flags hanging from every post office. Political systems usually change more quietly than that. A program created to solve one problem becomes permanent. Another private decision becomes a political decision. Something that sounded radical twenty years ago becomes ordinary, and the next argument starts from there.

Jimy gets at the same problem in his section on big government. Why should anyone assume a centralized government can competently make millions of specialized decisions better than the people who actually have to live with them?

The American idea of self-government was never limited to voting. Families, churches, businesses, charities, towns and voluntary organizations once handled enormous parts of ordinary civic life themselves. Tocqueville famously noticed this nearly two centuries ago. Americans saw problems, formed associations and tried to solve them.

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Moving responsibility upward changes that relationship. Citizens surrender some responsibility along with the burden. Local institutions matter less. Problems once handled by families and communities become political problems waiting for Washington.

And Washington is already enormous.

The Congressional Budget Office projects $7.4 trillion in federal spending in 2026 against about $5.6 trillion in revenue, leaving a deficit of roughly $1.9 trillion in a single year. Debt held by the public is about 101 percent of GDP and is projected to reach 120 percent by 2036.

Both parties helped build that monster. But when government can spend $7.4 trillion and still come up almost $2 trillion short, asking it to assume still more responsibility deserves a little scrutiny.

You can see another side of economic policy without ever opening a CBO report. Just go grocery shopping.

When inflation falls, the previous price increases do not disappear. If something costs $100 and inflation pushes it to $108, getting inflation back down to 3 percent does not return the price to $100. Now you are adding 3 percent to $108.

You’re still getting screwed. You’re just getting screwed more slowly.

Jimy also talks about election integrity. Here again, the political argument sometimes sounds much more divided than voters actually are.

Pew found in 2025 that 95 percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Democrats favored requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification.

Seven out of ten Democrat voters. Whatever else someone believes about election law, voter ID clearly isn’t an idea confined to Republicans.

Jimy also raises mandates, CBDCs and government control. Different issues, same institutional problem.

Presidents change. Congress changes. Political coalitions change.

The power usually remains.

Authority handed to people you trust today can eventually be exercised by people you wouldn’t trust to feed your dog.

Thirty-three years ago, the Democrat Party was openly praising free enterprise and market forces. Today, roughly two-thirds of Democrats view socialism favorably.

That does not mean every Democrat means the same thing by socialism. It does mean the political ground has moved a long way.

I’ve had 58 years to watch it move.

Jimy sees many of those same changes. He lays out seven reasons for his concern, and he doesn’t bury them under twenty paragraphs of political throat-clearing.

Jimy’s Original

Below is the link to Jimy’s document exactly as he sent it to me. Please read it.

Why You Should Vote Republican.docx

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“When politicians tell you what they intend to do with power, believe them.”

When Donald Trump won the White House again in November 2024, I did not start celebrating like the war was over. I started a clock.

Republicans had won the presidency and control of Congress. Trump had four years in office on paper, but politically we might have only two. The 2026 midterms could split the government again, and once that happened, whatever momentum existed could grind down very quickly.

I remember thinking we had been handed an opportunity, not a permanent victory. That was one of the reasons I put myself back out there.

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The Clock Started in 2024

I had been publicly political before. I even ran carnellknowledge.com back around 2001. But hardly anybody knew who I was then, and there is a huge difference between having opinions online and attaching your real name to hundreds of political essays that thousands of people actually read. The quieter version is a much easier way to live.

I gave up a lot of that voluntarily. I attached my name and face to arguments challenging accepted narratives about politics, race, immigration, culture, media, government and the institutions that shape what people are allowed to question. I went after hypocrisy, bad data, convenient history and subjects most people would rather leave alone. I knew some people would hate it. I figured some friendships might get weird. I did not fully appreciate how permanent the whole thing becomes once you put a few hundred political essays under your real name.

I’ve lost friends on the left whom I genuinely liked. My political writing is now tied to my professional identity whether I want it there or not. Someone thinking about hiring me for SEO does not just find a guy who has been doing this since before Google existed. He can also find hundreds of political essays and a rather active Twitter account before he finishes his coffee.

That may already have cost me business. I had a Canadian SEO client for more than 18 months who was happy with my work. Canada’s real estate market went into the toilet, which is a perfectly legitimate reason for him to cut expenses. But he had also recently seen my Twitter feed. I cannot prove my politics had anything to do with his decision, but once you know a client has seen exactly what you think, it becomes hard not to wonder.

Nobody forced me to take that risk. I did it because I thought the next few years were too important to sit around hoping someone else would say the things I thought needed saying.

We had also already watched what happened during Trump’s first term and after it. A Democrat-controlled House impeached him in 2019. He was impeached again after January 6. Congress spent years investigating him. Then came criminal prosecutions, civil cases and efforts to keep him off state ballots.

Supporters of all of that call it accountability. A lot of people on my side call much of it lawfare. I have generally preferred the less clinical term Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Whatever label you prefer, the intensity was right in front of us. I had no reason to think putting Trump back in the White House would make his opponents suddenly mellow out, discover bipartisan yoga and spend four years agreeing to disagree. The same politicians were still there. The same activist groups were still there. The same ideological institutions were still there, and the socialist wing of the Democrat coalition was not exactly getting more embarrassed about being socialist.

I wanted to use whatever runway we had.

The idea behind this publication was not especially complicated. Produce serious work. Back the arguments with data. Take on subjects larger publications either ignore or approach from the same approved direction. Keep most of it open so it can spread. Grow the audience, then grow the paid base enough that the publication gradually buys back more of my working day.

I was not dreaming about becoming a celebrity pundit. I wanted enough recurring income that I could spend more of my day researching, writing and eventually producing more video instead of selling those same hours somewhere else.

For a while, it looked like that was happening. The audience grew. Paid subscribers grew. The archive became hundreds of essays deep. I started seeing pieces escape my own subscriber base and travel far beyond anything I could have pushed manually.

Then the calendar kept moving.

We are now less than two months from the November 3, 2026 midterms. Half of the four-year period I was thinking about after Trump’s victory is already gone.

And right as the political clock started getting uncomfortable, the economics underneath this publication started moving in the wrong direction too.

Once your name is attached to hundreds of controversial political arguments, there is no reset button. Employers can see it. Clients can see it. Neighbors can see it. With a few searches, people can find personal information about me that I wish required considerably more effort.

This week also marks one year since Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. And Charlie is hardly the only reminder that political violence has stopped being theoretical.

Trump himself has faced three serious attempts or attacks since 2024. In Butler, a bullet hit his ear and killed a man in the crowd. Two months later, a man with a rifle was caught waiting near Trump’s golf course and was later convicted of trying to assassinate him. Then, in April of this year, an armed attacker tried to breach the White House Correspondents’ Dinner while Trump was inside. U.S. officials later said the gunman was trying to assassinate President Donald Trump.

Trump has been shot. Another man was convicted of trying to kill him. Charlie Kirk was murdered while speaking to college students. Political threat is considerably less theoretical than it used to be.

The day after Charlie was murdered, I wrote that the answer could not be retreat. I still believe that. But physical violence is only the most extreme way political conflict plays out. Most political power is exercised through laws, agencies, investigations, budgets, courts and congressional committees.

They’re Telling Us What Comes Next

And Democrat leaders are already telling us how they intend to use some of those institutions if they get them back.

House Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries said:

“No one is going to get a pass. We’re going to hold every single member of the Trump cartel accountable, beginning on day one.”

Beginning on day one.

He said Judiciary and Oversight would lead that work. He has also called for nationwide judicial reform, nationwide electoral reform and nationwide campaign finance reform, and said that when it comes to judicial reform, “everything should be on the table.”

Ro Khanna was even less subtle:

“When we take back the House, when we take back the Senate, we subpoena, we investigate, and we prosecute.”

In the same speech, Khanna said:

“That is why we must abolish ICE.”

Those aren’t Republicans guessing what Democrats might secretly do. Those are Democrats speaking for themselves.

Then there is the Democratic Socialists of America. They are not hiding what they want.

Its 2026 program calls for abolishing ICE, ending ICE detention and deportations, abolishing the Electoral College and abolishing the Senate. It proposes replacing the current president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

It also calls for:

“Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.”

You can spend an afternoon looking for a gentler description of that if you want. DSA already chose socialism.

I occasionally call it commie-land.

Now put those statements next to the fights already underway.

Trump and DOGE tore through USAID. More than 90 percent of USAID’s aid contracts, valued at roughly $54 billion, were terminated during the 2025 review. Democrats fought the dismantling, arguing that it damaged humanitarian programs and American influence abroad.

My own research has made me considerably less sentimental about the old system. USAID money did not flow only into food, medicine and wells. It also moved through NGOs, contractors, media projects, democracy programs, gender initiatives and a huge international-development industry.

ActBlue is under Republican investigation over its fraud controls and possible foreign contributions. ActBlue disputes the allegations and says the investigations are partisan. The part nobody needs to speculate about is what happens to congressional oversight if the House changes hands: Republicans stop running the committees conducting those investigations.

Then there is the SAVE America Act. The House passed it 218 to 213 in February, with only one Democrat voting yes. It would require documentary proof of citizenship for federal voter registration and impose federal voter-identification requirements. Republicans say that citizenship should be verified in elections restricted to citizens. Democrats say the requirements would unnecessarily burden legitimate voters.

Democrats overwhelmingly oppose the bill. If they take the House before it becomes law, its route through that chamber is finished.

The administration is separately fighting in court over the use of federal citizenship data to check voter rolls. As of September 8, it has asked the Supreme Court to allow use of the revised SAVE immigration database after lower courts blocked it over statutory, privacy and accuracy concerns.

Immigration itself is even less ambiguous. Trump has spent his second term pushing aggressive enforcement. Khanna says abolish ICE. DSA says abolish ICE. Others on the left argue for substantially reducing the agency’s role or replacing it.

Congressional apportionment also uses total resident population, citizens and noncitizens alike. The Census Bureau explicitly includes unauthorized immigrants who usually reside in the United States. Immigration is not just about who crosses the border. It creates a political pipeline. Noncitizens count toward the population used to distribute House seats. Immigrants who eventually become citizens become voters. Long before that, immigrant communities can organize, protest, lobby, advocate and even participate in some campaign activity. Illegal immigrants themselves cannot legally vote in federal elections, but their presence can still affect political representation. Legal immigrants can eventually become part of the electorate. The political effects begin long before Election Day.

USAID has been torn apart. ActBlue is being investigated. The SAVE America Act is stalled. Voter-roll verification is in court. Immigration enforcement is one of the defining fights of Trump’s second term.

Meanwhile Jeffries is promising accountability beginning on day one and Khanna is promising subpoenas, investigations and prosecutions.

If you think all of this is going to become less hostile when political control changes hands, I admire your optimism.

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The Publication Worked

Over the past year, my paid subscriber count went from roughly 96 to more than 200. Gross annualized subscription revenue went from about $7,800 to more than $23,000.

An Inconvenient Black Truth was originally sent to 229 subscribers. As I write this, it has 119,497 views.

A piece sent to 229 people has now been viewed more than 500 times that number.

Whatever else I have gotten wrong over the past two years, that settled one question. A tiny independent publication can reach a hell of a lot more people than its subscriber count suggests.

The idea from there was pretty simple. More readers bring more paid subscribers. More paid subscribers buy back working hours. Those hours produce more research, essays and video, giving the publication more opportunities to reach new people.

Instead, paid subscriptions peaked in the mid 230s and slipped back toward 210. Then I lost two SEO clients that represented a large share of my income outside Substack.

That changes things quickly. Food still costs money. The car costs money. Utilities cost money. Rent definitely costs money, and right now I am dealing with the very real possibility of being late on it.

So I drive Uber. During the right periods, I can make more driving than I probably would at a lot of ordinary jobs. It isn’t bad money.

It just has a hard ceiling.

There are only so many profitable driving periods, and if I need another $200, I need another block of hours. I am already doing that across seven days a week.

I recently spent six hours driving and made less than $200. Those six hours helped pay that day’s bills. Tomorrow they earn nothing.

Compare that with the essay sent to 229 people that is still being read by people I have never met.

Most essays will never do that. Maybe none of the next hundred will. I could spend six hours researching something and discover that my original premise was wrong. I do that too.

But one already reached 119,497 people.

I want more swings.

Instead, right when the political runway is getting shorter, I am having to sell more of my day just to stay above water.

Now There Are Two Years Left

If the financial pressure keeps increasing, I drive more. Maybe eventually I take a conventional job. But a conventional job would not pay enough to eliminate the side work. I would still need additional income. I would just have fewer hours and considerably less control over when I could use them.

Nobody needs to censor mrchrisarnell.com. An essay that should take two days takes four. A research project gets pushed because I cannot justify 20 unpaid hours that week. Video keeps getting squeezed between everything else.

Do that long enough and there is simply less work.

Uber at least gives me some control over which pieces of the week I sell. A conventional job would take most of five days on somebody else’s schedule, and I would still have to find room for side work around it.

Either way, somebody else gets the hours.

And those hours are becoming more valuable as the political clock runs down.

If the Democrat Party wins the House in November, Trump’s presidency does not end. ICE does not vanish the following morning. But Republicans lose unified control of government.

The SAVE America Act is dead in a Democrat House unless Democrats dramatically reverse the position they have already taken. Republicans lose Judiciary and Oversight. Republican-led investigations change hands. The Democrat leadership already promising extensive oversight gains control of the committees issuing subpoenas.

A Democrat Senate creates a different obstacle. Presidents nominate federal judges and senior officials, but the Senate confirms many of them. A Senate controlled by the opposition can block nominees and legislation.

If Democrats take both chambers, Trump still controls the executive branch, but major new legislation becomes much harder and congressional investigative power points in the opposite direction.

Two years later comes the White House.

A Democrat president gains something congressional Democrats do not have now: control of the executive branch.

Agency leadership changes. Enforcement priorities can change. Executive actions within presidential authority can be replaced. Regulations can be rewritten through the legal process. Justice Department leadership changes. Immigration enforcement can change substantially. A new president selects nominees for federal judges and senior government positions.

The exact result would depend on Congress, the courts, internal party disagreements and future elections. No political party gets everything it wants.

But we don’t have to invent what some of the people seeking power want. They are saying it out loud.

I made my choice in 2024 because I thought we had four years to build something stronger. I spent the first two doing it.

Nearly 300 essays. Paid readership more than doubled. Subscription revenue almost tripled. One essay sent to 229 subscribers reached almost 120,000 views.

Along the way I lost friends, permanently attached my political opinions to my professional identity and made myself considerably easier to dislike.

I can live with that.

What bothers me is watching the remaining runway disappear while the economics force me to spend more of it doing work that ends when the shift ends.

Six hours in the car recently produced less than $200. Six hours here might produce an essay 1,200 people read and forget. It might produce a chart nobody shares. It might turn up absolutely nothing useful.

Every once in a while, though, something breaks out.

I want more chances at that.

Buy Back the Hours

More than 200 readers already pay for this publication. A small group has gone much further through Resistance Core at $1,200 per year, and many have also made additional one-time contributions. Others have stepped up when they could.

I would not still be producing this much without them.

Most of my work remains open because I want someone who has never paid me a dime to be able to read an essay and send it to somebody else. That openness is a large part of how a publication this small can occasionally reach an audience this large.

I can give the work away. I cannot manufacture the hours it takes to make it.

If money is genuinely tight, keep reading. Feed your family. Pay your rent. I know what that feels like.

I am talking to the people who have been here for months or years, read regularly, can afford to back the work and keep thinking they will probably become paid eventually.

Eventually was easier to say in November 2024.

We had four years then. Half of them are gone, the first major political deadline is almost here, and I am deciding which hours this week belong to this publication and which belong to rent.

A paid subscription here does not mainly buy access. Most of the work is already open.

It buys back some of those hours.

Six hours in the car recently produced less than $200.

Six hours here might go nowhere.

Or they might become something people are still reading a year later.

I want more chances at that before the clock runs out.

We had four years. Now we have two.

Help Me Use the Two Years We Have Left

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If you read regularly and want me to keep showing up, becoming a paid subscriber is the simplest way to help.

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Resistance Core is for the small group of readers who believe strongly enough in what I am doing to help fund it at a much higher level. It is $1,200 per year, charged annually, and that kind of support can buy back a meaningful amount of working time over the course of a year.

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“How many years does a country have to wait before it is allowed to say assimilation failed? Ten? Twenty? A generation? Two?”

Michael Savage’s first word was Borders. The second was Language. Now we get to the third: Culture.

In BORDERS, I argued that a border is not simply a fence. It is the system through which Americans decide who enters, how many enter, why they are coming and when temporary admission becomes permanent membership.

In LANGUAGE, I argued that a country containing hundreds of millions of people from every racial, religious and ethnic background needs a common language through which they can understand one another.

Immigrants do learn English. Their children generally learn it even better. Indians often arrive already speaking it. Hispanic English proficiency improves dramatically across generations. I included those facts because if the evidence complicates my argument, then my argument needs to get better.

Everybody speaks English. Now what?

A man can speak flawless English and still believe women should have fewer rights than men. He can believe insulting his religion should be punished, clan loyalty matters more than impartial law, corruption is simply how business gets done, political violence is justified when elections do not go his way or his first political loyalty belongs to a country 8,000 miles away.

English allows us to understand what he is saying. It does not require us to accept it.

That is why Savage needed a third word, and it is where my patience starts running out.

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Culture Has Consequences

Americans have been trained to think about culture in the safest possible way. Culture means tacos, Bollywood, Chinese New Year, saris, mosques, German beer halls and somebody’s grandmother making tamales.

Great. None of that is the problem.

Culture is also the collection of assumptions people carry around about authority, family, religion, honesty, sex, violence, marriage, women, children, government, loyalty, outsiders, work, law and individual freedom.

Some cultural differences make dinner more interesting. Others determine whether your daughter has rights.

We have spent decades flattening the word culture until it means little more than food, festivals and costumes. Somebody says “diversity is our strength,” everyone nods approvingly and apparently the thinking part is over.

It isn’t.

Diversity can mean a Catholic living next door to an atheist, an Indian engineer working beside a black programmer or a Korean family opening a restaurant next to a Jewish deli. It can also mean bringing large numbers of people from societies where assumptions about religious authority, women, free expression, corruption, family obligations, government and individual rights differ sharply from our own.

The first kind of diversity mostly changes what is available for dinner. The second can change what kind of country your grandchildren inherit.

Not every cultural difference deserves applause simply because somebody put the word diversity in front of it.

America Actually Has a Culture

Modern America has developed a strange habit of pretending there is no such thing as American culture, as though we are merely a geographic location with a GDP. Unfortunately, decades of propaganda and an education system that increasingly teaches young Americans to be embarrassed by their own country have produced exactly that.

American culture has never meant that everybody eats the same food, worships the same God, listens to the same music or came from the same bloodline. America was fighting over religion, race, immigration and class long before anybody reading this was born. Underneath all of that developed a civic culture.

The Constitution outranks your religion. The law applies to you whether your grandfather was born in Boston, Bangalore or Mogadishu. Government is not supposed to punish you because you criticized somebody’s faith. Unless, of course, you’re a Baltimore County school board member who posts something critical of Sharia law. A woman has the same legal standing as a man. An individual is not legally owned by his clan, church, tribe, husband, father or racial group. Political power changes through elections rather than coups, machetes or mobs.

You may worship God or decide there is no God. You may call somebody else’s religion wonderful, ridiculous or evil. You may own property, challenge the government and demand due process before the state takes your freedom.

America has violated those principles plenty of times. Slavery and Jim Crow are the obvious examples. But hypocrisy does not erase a principle. In fact, Americans condemned those injustices precisely because the country had violated standards it claimed to believe. The fact that America has sometimes failed to live up to its ideals is not an argument for abandoning the ideals.

Even citizenship law recognizes that becoming American is supposed to mean more than receiving different paperwork. A naturalizing citizen swears to renounce foreign allegiances, support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States, and bear true faith and allegiance to them.

That sounds suspiciously like a culture to me.

America is not an empty hotel room where everyone who checks in gets to rearrange the furniture.

Assimilation Does Not Mean Becoming a Clone

Assimilation does not mean erasing every custom you brought with you. Keep the food, holidays, religion, family traditions and language you use at home. None of that is the issue.

I lived in Germany and remained American the entire time. Learning German did not erase me. It allowed me to function inside Germany.

Assimilation does not require sameness. It requires compatibility.

You want your religion to dictate what you eat? That’s your business. You want it to dictate what I am allowed to say? No.

You want to arrange a marriage between two consenting adults? None of my business. You want coercion to substitute for consent? No.

A foreign government, religious court, tribal structure or clan elder claiming authority above American law is something else entirely.

We don’t do that here. Or at least we shouldn’t.

The old melting-pot idea never required eliminating every difference among people. It meant putting millions of very different people through enough common institutions, expectations and experiences that eventually they became Americans who happened to have different backgrounds.

Somewhere along the way, we decided expecting the melting pot to actually melt anything was culturally insensitive.

America will change somewhat as immigrants arrive. It always has. Pizza became American. Tacos became American. Irish, Jewish, Italian, Polish, Asian, Hispanic and black cultures have all shaped the country.

The issue is not whether newcomers influence America. They will. The issue is whether America still decides which principles are negotiable.

Some things should not be.

Nobody Factory-Resets at Customs

One of the dumbest assumptions hiding inside modern immigration politics is that crossing a border somehow wipes a person’s mental hard drive.

It doesn’t. People arrive carrying ideas, strengths and weaknesses just like everyone else. They may bring ambition, work ethic, family loyalty and entrepreneurship. They may also bring prejudices, political habits, religious assumptions, tribal conflicts and cultural baggage from the societies they left.

When I lived in Germany, I did not step off the plane and stop thinking like an American. I carried America around in my head. Modern technology makes maintaining the old world easier than at any other point in human history.

In LANGUAGE, I compared an Italian arriving in New York in 1900 with an immigrant living in Texas in 2026. The Italian could write letters home and maybe occasionally travel back. For the most part, America was in his face every day.

The immigrant today can wake up reading Indian news, spend lunch inside Indian social-media groups, FaceTime India after dinner, watch Indian television, follow Indian politics, stream Indian entertainment and remain continuously plugged into the society he physically left. The same principle applies to immigrants from Mexico, Somalia, China, Pakistan or almost anywhere else.

Sometimes you do not have to guess where the emotional attachment still lies. In the 2024 T20 Cricket World Cup on Long Island, India actually played the United States. The stadium was packed with Indian-American fans, some carrying signs that read “USA is home. India is heart” and “I live in the US but my heart always belongs to India.”

One of them was Ankur Barot. He was born in India, became an American citizen and had served six years in the U.S. Army. His 13-year-old son rooted for the United States. Barot rooted for India, wearing the Indian flag. When his son told him he was supporting America instead of India, Barot said it “broke my heart a little bit,” while acknowledging that his son was American and loved the United States.

Then came this summer’s soccer World Cup. When the United States played Bosnia and Herzegovina in California, Lejla Kuhinja, who was born in Bosnia but had lived in America since 1995, described the matchup as “a homeland versus a motherland.” She wanted Bosnia to win. Thirty-one years in America, yet when the two countries finally faced each other, America was still the homeland and Bosnia was still the motherland.

Rooting for a foreign sports team does not make somebody disloyal. But these moments reveal something a questionnaire may not. For some immigrants, America can become the place they live, work, raise their children and become citizens while the country they left remains the place of their deepest national attachment.

How long should that distinction last? Five years? Twenty? Thirty? Forever?

Immigration moves the body immediately. Assimilation has to move the mind.

The evidence says it often does. Second-generation immigrants tend to identify more strongly with America, improve economically, broaden their social networks and marry outside their ancestral groups more often than their parents did.

Muslim Americans are useful here because the cultural distance between American norms and those of some Muslim-majority countries can be considerable. Pew found in 2017 that 92 percent of Muslim Americans said they were proud to be American. Among Muslim immigrants, those who had lived here longer were also far more likely than recent arrivals to say they had a lot in common with other Americans.

But “proud to be American” is not a synonym for culturally assimilated. A person can value American prosperity, citizenship and constitutional protection while simultaneously wanting American institutions or social norms to move closer to his own religious beliefs.

Pew’s findings on homosexuality show why the distinction cannot be ignored. In 2007, only 27 percent of Muslim Americans said homosexuality should be accepted by society. By 2017, that had risen to 52 percent. Yet Pew’s newer 2023-24 Religious Landscape Study found only 41 percent saying homosexuality should be accepted, while 55 percent said it should be discouraged. The surveys use somewhat different methods, so those numbers should not be treated as one perfectly clean trend line.

But they certainly do not support some comforting story in which cultural differences simply disappear with time.

Assimilation can happen. Assuming it inevitably will is something else entirely.

America has assimilated millions of people who arrived with very different assumptions. That makes persistent failure harder to excuse, not easier.

Thirty Years Is Not “New”

Minnesota gives us an uncomfortable example.

The major Somali migration to Minnesota dates to the early 1990s. Minnesota’s own employment agency traces the first large wave to 1992, following the collapse and civil war in Somalia.

That was 34 years ago.

At some point we have to stop describing every persistent problem inside an immigrant community as the temporary struggle of new arrivals.

Minnesota’s Department of Employment and Economic Development published a revealing study in March 2026 examining more than 26,000 Somali students who exited Minnesota high schools between 2006 and 2022. Nearly 97 percent had come from low-income families as measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch. About 73.5 percent had been classified as having limited English proficiency at some point during high school. Only about 27 percent earned a postsecondary credential, and Somali students took roughly nine years after high school to reach a living wage, compared with six years for the white comparison group.

Those are ugly numbers, but the same study also found strong employment participation among Somali young adults, including a higher employment rate than the white comparison group. So this is not simply a story about people refusing to work.

The newest Minnesota demographic report shows this is no longer simply an English problem.

Among Somali Minnesotans age five and older, the state estimates roughly 53,600 speak English well, while about 10,800 do not speak it well or at all. Most of the population in that age group therefore falls on the English-proficient side of the state’s measure.

So if somebody wants to explain every bad outcome by saying, They just need time to learn English, that excuse is starting to wear pretty thin.

Minnesota’s 2026 report puts Somali median household income at about $42,500, compared with $130,200 for Asian Indian households and $82,700 statewide. Somali households were near the bottom of every cultural group studied, while Asian Indian households were at the top.

The education difference is just as hard to ignore. The state found that 37 percent of Somali adults ages 25 to 64 lacked a high-school diploma or GED, the highest share of any cultural group Minnesota examined. Asian Indians sat at the opposite end of the scale, with exceptionally high college attainment.

Different populations. Same state. Same American economy. Same basic laws.

Very different results.

There is also the public-assistance question.

American Community Survey calculations supplied by Minnesota’s state demographer found that during 2019 through 2023, about 60 percent of Minnesotans reporting Somali ancestry received SNAP and 78 percent were covered by Medicaid. When SNAP, Medicaid and the much narrower category of public-assistance income were combined, about 84 percent received at least one.

That does not mean 84 percent collected cash welfare. Only about 8 percent reported public-assistance income in the narrower Census sense, and Medicaid accounted for a large portion of the overall number, particularly among children.

If I have to lie about the number to make the argument, the argument isn’t worth much.

Even after all those qualifications, what exactly are Americans supposed to call the broader picture?

After more than three decades, most people covered by the state measure speak English well and younger Somalis participate heavily in the workforce. Those facts eliminate some easy explanations. They do not eliminate the problem.

Enormous disparities remain in household income, education and reliance on means-tested programs.

At some point, poor assimilation cannot be blamed on being new, and poor outcomes cannot all be blamed on not speaking English.

When does the clock run out on give it time? Twenty years? Thirty? Fifty?

If those outcomes persist into another generation, Americans are entitled to ask whether immigration policy should care not merely about how many people enter but how effectively particular streams of migration integrate after they arrive.

Refusing to ask that question because somebody might call it racist is not serious policymaking.

Not all immigrant populations produce the same outcomes. If the single label immigrant explained everything, Indians and Somalis living under the same Minnesota government would not produce economic and educational numbers that look as different as they do.

People arrive with different education levels, languages, skills, family structures, migration histories and cultural backgrounds.

Pretending none of that is relevant is not compassion.

It is refusing to look.

The Melting Pot Requires Heat

Assimilation requires pressure. Not police-state pressure, just the ordinary pressure created by social expectations, work, schools, neighbors, language, friendship, marriage and shared institutions.

It also requires a clear understanding that the country you entered existed before you got there and will not apologize for expecting you to become part of it.

That happened to me in Germany. Nobody arrested me for speaking English and nobody threw rocks at me. Germany simply conducted German life in German. The ATM was German. My coworkers spoke German. Television was German. The doctor was German. My girlfriend spoke German to me. The bank operated in German.

I learned German because I had incentives to learn it.

Modern America increasingly creates incentives in the opposite direction.

Translation may sometimes be necessary, and ethnic businesses, religious institutions and foreign-language media are perfectly legal. Legality is not the same question as assimilation.

Put enough of those pieces together, though, and something changes.

A person can potentially find doctors, attorneys, employers, realtors, stores, religious institutions, political organizations, media and a social network largely inside his own community. Add smartphones, instant translation, foreign television, cheap international communication and daily contact with the old country, and the larger American culture becomes much easier to avoid than it was a century ago.

That does not guarantee non-assimilation. It reduces some of the pressure that once made assimilation difficult to escape.

The old melting pot required heat. If everyone enters it and is assured he should never have to change, then the metaphor no longer describes what is happening.

Assimilation means America changes the immigrant more than the immigrant changes America. Otherwise the word has lost its meaning.

America will change too. That is inevitable. But somebody still has to provide the basic rules.

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Diversity Is Not a Magic Word

“Diversity is our strength.”

Maybe. Sometimes. Under the right conditions. It certainly is not a law of physics.

A major 2020 review in the Annual Review of Political Science examined 1,001 estimates from 87 studies dealing with ethnic diversity and social trust. The researchers found an overall statistically significant negative relationship, particularly for trust in neighbors and when diversity was measured at the local level.

No study proves every diverse neighborhood will become dysfunctional. That is not the claim. The point is that the endlessly repeated slogan “diversity is our strength” has to be proved, not recited.

Cohesion matters. So does trust, especially the belief that your neighbor generally accepts the same basic rules you do.

A population can contain enormous racial and religious diversity and remain cohesive if people trust the same institutions, obey the same laws and increasingly see one another as fellow citizens. It can also become more tribal as it becomes more diverse.

The danger is not that your neighbor has darker skin, worships differently or eats food you cannot pronounce. The danger begins when politics teaches both of you that his skin and your skin place you in competing political tribes with different grievances, different interests and different claims on government.

At that point diversity stops being merely demographic and becomes political infrastructure.

Culture Has a Price Tag Too

Most immigrants work, but that is not the entire economic calculation. They require housing, schools, roads, medical capacity and government services while also working, paying taxes, opening businesses and creating demand. Both sides of the ledger exist.

CBO estimated that the immigration surge beginning in 2021 produced $10.1 billion in additional state and local revenue in 2023 but $19.3 billion in direct additional spending, leaving a $9.2 billion direct net cost. Its broader measure put the net cost at $9.8 billion. Major expenses included public schools, shelter and related services, and border security. CBO also estimated an additional $1.2 billion for services to English-language learners.

At the federal level, the picture was different. CBO projected the same immigration surge would reduce federal deficits by roughly $900 billion from 2024 through 2034 while increasing total nominal GDP by about $8.9 trillion over that period.

There is nothing contradictory about those findings. But neither is the federal number some magical rebuttal to the costs Americans experience locally. A larger population can produce more GDP and more federal revenue while simultaneously making housing more expensive and leaving states, cities and lower-skilled workers carrying costs of their own.

CBO also projected that through 2026 the surge would slightly slow wage growth for workers already here with twelve or fewer years of education because the supply of workers with similar skills increased. CBO expects that effect to reverse later as other productivity effects emerge.

Housing is even easier to understand.

CBO has said directly that the immigration surge increased housing demand and put upward pressure on home prices and rents, with larger effects in places where zoning, geography or other constraints prevent supply from expanding quickly.

Apparently supply and demand still works when Congress discusses immigration.

Add millions of people to a country with a housing shortage and those people require somewhere to live. That does not make them evil. It makes them people.

Crime deserves the same honesty. If I tell you immigrants as a whole have higher crime rates than native-born Americans, the best available evidence does not support me. Health-care use complicates the easy story too.

Then don’t make claims the evidence does not support.

There are plenty of real consequences without inventing fake ones. Immigration policy does not require proving immigrants are uniquely criminal, unhealthy or dependent. It requires answering a simpler question: How many people should America admit, which people, and what happens to Americans already here when it does?

Population growth has consequences even when the additional resident is Mother Teresa.

CBO’s newest demographic outlook makes the long-term issue even harder to ignore. Starting in 2030, CBO now projects annual American deaths will exceed births. From that point forward, net immigration accounts for all projected population growth. Without immigration, the population would begin shrinking.

Think about what that means.

Immigration is becoming the mechanism through which America determines whether its population grows and, increasingly, what that future population looks like.

That is not merely labor policy anymore.

It is national policy in the most literal sense.

Eventually national population policy becomes political.

When Diversity Becomes a Tactic

Here comes the part people will hate.

The subtitle says that at some point diversity stops being an experiment and starts becoming a tactic, so let’s talk about the Democrat Party.

I cannot prove Democrat leaders gather in a dark room every Tuesday and ask how they can destroy American cohesion before lunch. I don’t need to. Look at what they publicly support.

The Democrat Party’s most recent national platform supported permanently increasing family-sponsored and employment-based immigration. It backed legislation adding 250,000 immigrant visas over five years, expanded lawful pathways and citizenship opportunities, and touted faster naturalization processing.

That is their policy. Americans are under no obligation to pretend its demographic consequences are accidental or politically irrelevant.

The DNC also openly organizes along demographic and constituency lines. Its own “Who We Serve” operation includes African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, Ethnic Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, women and numerous other constituencies. Its Ethnic Americans organization describes itself as working through networks “organized along immigrant and ethnic lines” to foster support for Democrat candidates and causes.

Its Latino operation is even more explicit. The DNC says that as the Latino population grows, those communities have increasingly turned out and organized around shared priorities with Democrats. Its Adelante program is specifically designed to register, organize and mobilize Latino voters in English and Spanish.

None of that is secret. It is on their own website.

Before somebody on the right gets lazy, naturalized citizens are not guaranteed Democrat voters. In 2020 they strongly favored Biden. By 2024 that margin had nearly disappeared. Pew found naturalized voters divided about 51 percent for Harris and 47 percent for Trump.

So stop saying Democrats simply “import voters” as though every immigrant arrives with a DNC membership card tucked into his suitcase.

The Democrat Party supports larger immigration flows, broader citizenship pathways and faster naturalization. It then openly maintains political operations designed to organize many of the ethnic and immigrant-origin constituencies those policies help enlarge.

Some eventually vote Republican. That means the political payoff is not guaranteed. It does not mean demographic politics does not exist.

Every immigration policy eventually becomes a population policy. Population policy changes the electorate. The electorate changes government. Government changes the country.

The more troubling issue is what happens when the political system trains Americans to think primarily as members of competing demographic groups.

A cohesive electorate asks what is good for the country. A fragmented electorate increasingly asks what its particular group gets. Politicians then become brokers of grievances, benefits and identities.

Your grievance for your vote. Your benefit for your turnout. Your identity for their power.

A country becomes harder to govern as one people when politics trains everyone to think of himself as a member of a competing tribe. If immigration continuously adds populations that political organizations immediately classify, court and mobilize as ethnic constituencies, fragmentation can become politically useful.

That is what I mean by tactic.

Not a secret plan scribbled on a napkin somewhere in Washington.

A political system that has learned how to convert demographic difference into power.

The Suicide Part Is Ours

Politicians encouraged it. Activists rationalized it. Some immigrants took full advantage of it. But Americans built the system that made all of it possible.

You cannot assimilate millions of newcomers into a culture you are afraid to defend.

What exactly are immigrants supposed to assimilate into when our own institutions struggle to say America is worth assimilating into?

We teach American history so often through the lens of national shame that achievement can become an afterthought. Patriotism becomes suspicious. Assimilation becomes xenophobic. Expectations become oppression. Borders become cruelty. A common language becomes intolerance.

At the same time, every minority population is encouraged to preserve identity indefinitely while the idea of a common American identity is increasingly treated as vaguely threatening.

Imagine inviting somebody into your family while telling him your family is awful, its history is disgusting, its traditions are embarrassing, its rules are oppressive and he should feel absolutely no obligation to adopt them.

What result would you expect?

Every civilization depends on transmission. Parents teach children. Schools teach history. Institutions reward particular behavior. Citizens enforce expectations informally. Newcomers discover which rules are negotiable and which are not.

Stop transmitting those norms and nothing guarantees they simply float around forever.

A civilization embarrassed by itself is already halfway to surrender.

The immigrant is not solely responsible for assimilation. The host country has a job too.

It needs something worth joining and enough confidence to say so.

There Have to Be Non-Negotiables

What should assimilation actually require?

Not hamburgers, country music, Christianity, white skin or pretending your ancestors came over on the Mayflower.

The standard should be civic.

American constitutional law outranks religious law, clan law and foreign political authority. Men and women possess equal legal rights. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to insult your religion. Freedom of religion includes the freedom to leave your religion. Political disputes get settled through laws, elections and persuasion rather than threats or violence.

No imported caste receives legal recognition. No ethnic or religious population gets veto power over criticism. No immigrant community should come to America, organize politically along ethnic lines, elect its own people and then use that power to recreate the country it left. No husband, father, imam, pastor, activist or clan elder owns another adult citizen. Citizenship should require loyalty to the United States above foreign political causes.

Within those boundaries, do whatever you want.

Keep anything you brought with you that fits inside them.

What does not fit stays behind.

People leave countries for war, poverty, education, persecution, jobs and family. Leaving Somalia does not mean rejecting every Somali custom any more than living in Germany made me reject everything American.

But choosing America does not obligate America to recreate the place you left.

America offers access to one of the largest economies on Earth, universities, courts, property rights, constitutional protections, labor markets, political stability and potentially citizenship.

Assimilation is not some extraordinary favor immigrants perform for America. It should be part of the price of admission.

Who Gets the Keys?

There is one more conclusion I have reached that will probably piss people off. I do not think becoming a naturalized citizen should automatically make someone eligible to hold elected office in the United States.

The Constitution already recognizes the concern. A naturalized citizen can never become president. The Founders were explicitly worried about foreign influence and attachments formed before someone became American. For the House they required seven years of citizenship. For the Senate, nine. In discussing the Senate, the Framers worried about the time necessary to overcome the “affections of education and native attachments,” and Federalist No. 62 argued that senators should be sufficiently removed from the habits and assumptions associated with foreign birth and education.

But think about how strange the logic becomes once you apply it only to the presidency.

Imagine your house has a front door, a side door and a back door. You decide that security is so important that nobody without the proper background can ever have a key to the front door. Then you hand out keys to the side and back doors.

Your house is not secure. You have simply protected one entrance.

Congress writes the laws. Governors wield executive power over entire states. State legislators determine education policy, election rules, taxes and criminal law. Mayors can govern cities larger than some countries. If foreign political attachment is a legitimate concern when somebody wants the keys to the White House, why does it magically become irrelevant when the same person wants the keys to Congress, a governor’s mansion or city hall?

And there is evidence that political assimilation, like cultural assimilation, can take time.

A 2021 Cato Institute survey found that first-generation immigrants leaned Democrat by a substantial margin: 48 percent identified with or leaned toward Democrats, compared with 26 percent Republican and 26 percent independent. More strikingly, 60 percent of first-generation immigrants viewed socialism favorably, compared with 49 percent of the second generation and 39 percent among later generations. Nearly half, 48 percent, said they viewed themselves more as global citizens than as citizens of the United States, more than twice the 21 percent among other native-born Americans.

Those numbers do not prove that most immigrants are Marxists or that naturalized citizens are disloyal. In fact, the same survey found strong attachment to America among many immigrants, and 63 percent of first-generation immigrants also viewed capitalism favorably. The point is more basic: people do not shed an entire lifetime of political assumptions at the naturalization ceremony. Political assimilation appears to change across generations just as language, identity and culture do.

That helps explain why the modern Democrat Party is obviously closer than the Republican Party to many of the larger-government and socialist-leaning preferences reflected in those numbers. That does not require a conspiracy and it certainly does not mean every immigrant votes Democrat. It means the political culture someone brings with him can affect which American political coalition feels familiar.

So I would go further than the Constitution currently does.

I would not allow naturalized citizens to hold elected office.

That is not because naturalized citizens are lesser human beings or because citizenship should be fake. Citizenship would still mean voting, working, owning property, speaking freely, raising a family and enjoying the same constitutional protection as every other citizen. But governing other Americans is not merely another benefit of citizenship. It is the exercise of public power.

There is a difference between saying, Welcome to America. You are one of us, and saying, Here are the keys. Start rewriting the rules.

Someone who immigrates at 35 could become an American citizen after spending the overwhelming majority of his formative life somewhere else. His education, political instincts, religious assumptions and understanding of government were not formed here. Maybe he assimilates completely. Maybe he does not. Either way, America is under no moral obligation to gamble governmental power on the assumption that a passport automatically rewrites a lifetime.

And if that sounds radical, remember that we already apply exactly that principle to the most powerful elected office in the country.

My argument is simply that if the principle is sound, we should stop pretending the other doors can be left unlocked.

How Long?

So we come back to the question at the beginning. How long does assimilation get? Ten years? Twenty? A generation? Two?

I do not know the magic number. Nobody does. What I do know is that eventually cannot be an immigration policy.

At some point outcomes matter.

If one immigrant population becomes overwhelmingly English proficient, economically successful, intermarried and institutionally integrated within a generation while another remains economically isolated, heavily dependent on public assistance or concentrated inside a parallel community decades later, Americans have every right to notice the difference.

More importantly, they have every right to use what they learn when deciding future immigration policy.

That does not mean deporting American citizens because somebody thinks they failed a cultural purity test. Citizens are citizens.

The sensible place to exercise judgment is before temporary admission becomes permanent settlement and before permanent settlement becomes citizenship.

That was the point of BORDERS.

America has the right to say yes, which necessarily means it retains the right to say no.

The criteria should include more than whether somebody can fill a job opening this quarter.

Countries last longer than quarterly earnings reports.

Borders. Language. Culture.

Thirty-two years ago Michael Savage reduced the argument to three words: Borders. Language. Culture.

It sounded harsh then. It sounds considerably less crazy today.

Borders determine who enters. Language determines whether we can understand one another.

Culture determines whether, after we understand one another, there is still an “us.”

America has already proved it can survive different skin colors, foods, accents, religions and places of birth. That was never the real test.

The real test is whether a country remains a country once enough of its people stop agreeing about the basic rules under which everyone is supposed to live.

A nation that imports people faster than it can assimilate them is not celebrating diversity.

It is gambling with its own continuity.

Worse, America has spent decades weakening some of the institutions and expectations that once made assimilation difficult to avoid, while political organizations discovered that demographic fragmentation can be converted into constituencies, constituencies into votes and votes into power.

Then the people who notice are told that noticing itself is hateful.

No.

At some point a civilization gets to defend itself. Citizenship has to mean something, assimilation has to produce an outcome rather than an excuse, and Americans have to be allowed to decide what America is going to remain.

At some point diversity stops being an experiment and starts becoming a tactic.

If saying that is intolerant, fine.

A functioning civilization has to be intolerant of something. It should probably start with the ideas capable of destroying it.

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People around the world learn English to get ahead. Why should expecting people who choose to live in America to learn it be considered unreasonable?

Michael Savage’s first word was Borders.

In the first essay, I argued that a border is much more than a fence separating Texas from Mexico. It is the entire system through which a country decides who enters, who stays, who works, who becomes permanent and, eventually, who becomes one of us.

Savage’s second word was Language.

At first glance, this one seems easier. Speak English. Problem solved.

Not quite.

There is nothing wrong with a Mexican family speaking Spanish over dinner, an Indian family speaking Hindi with grandparents or a Chinese couple speaking Mandarin in their own home. We as a country have never required immigrants to erase every trace of where they came from, nor should we.

The issue begins outside the home. Can hundreds of millions of people from different countries, races, religions and cultures function as one society if they cannot communicate directly with one another?

Speaking another language is not the problem. Living in America without a shared language is.

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English Was Never Just a Language

Think about how much of normal life assumes two strangers can understand one another.

A cop pulls somebody over. A patient explains where it hurts. A boss gives instructions. A teacher talks to a parent. A witness testifies in court. A customer asks a question. A voter listens to candidates explain what they intend to do. A soldier receives an order.

At that scale, language is not simply something people use to chat. It is infrastructure.

A country can accommodate hundreds of private languages. Families can preserve them. Churches can use them. Newspapers can print them. Businesses can advertise in them. None of that requires pretending a nation has no need for one language through which almost everybody can communicate.

A common language does not require everyone to sound alike. It requires everyone to be able to talk to one another.

President Trump made that principle federal policy on March 1, 2025, when he signed an executive order designating English as the official language of the United States. The order revoked a Clinton-era directive concerning limited-English access, although it did not order federal agencies to eliminate every translated document or multilingual service. Agencies retained discretion to continue them when appropriate. The Justice Department followed in July 2025 with guidance telling federal agencies to minimize nonessential multilingual services and put greater emphasis on English acquisition and assimilation.

By 2026, some agencies had begun taking that policy considerably further. HUD announced that departmental business and services would be conducted in English and that the department would end non-English translation services, subject to whatever legal obligations still applied.

Even after English became official, America remained multilingual in practice. So why English, specifically?

The Language the World Chose

There is something strange about Americans being told that expecting immigrants to learn English is culturally insensitive when people all over the planet voluntarily learn it for the exact opposite reason.

It is useful as hell.

Researchers have an entire field devoted to English as a global lingua franca. International business even has an acronym for it, BELF, or Business English as a Lingua Franca. It describes English being used as the common language between people who may not be native English speakers at all.

A Chinese executive and a German supplier may communicate in English because neither speaks the other’s language. An Indian engineer working with an American client uses English. Multinational companies operating across dozens of countries use it because there has to be some way for people from all those places to understand one another.

The same thing happened in science. English was once one of several major scientific languages. Today it dominates. One academic review found that by 2015 roughly 99 percent of publications in the natural sciences appeared in English.

Researchers who grew up speaking other languages obviously face an extra hurdle. But the fact that so many learn English anyway tells you how valuable it has become.

A Brazilian scientist learns it. A German businessman learns it. An Indian engineer learns it. A Korean executive learns it. They are not doing this because Americans forced them. They are doing it because English expands the number of people they can communicate with and the number of opportunities available to them.

English is not just the language Americans speak. It is the language much of the world learns when it wants to get ahead.

If people from countries thousands of miles away learn English to expand their opportunities, why should expecting immigrants living permanently in America to learn it be considered unreasonable?

What America Actually Speaks

Before anybody starts yelling that nobody speaks English anymore, we should look at the numbers.

The 2024 American Community Survey counted about 321.7 million people living in the United States age five and older. Roughly 247.7 million, or 77 percent, spoke only English at home. Another 74.1 million people, about 23 percent, spoke another language at home.

Seventy-four million sounds enormous because it is enormous, but it would be disingenuous to turn those 74 million people into 74 million people who cannot speak English. Most can.

About 45.1 million people who spoke another language at home also reported speaking English “very well.” Put everyone together and approximately 91 percent of U.S. residents age five and older either spoke only English or spoke English very well.

That leaves roughly 28.9 million people, about 9 percent of the population in that age group, who reported speaking English less than very well.

America is still overwhelmingly an English-speaking country, but 29 million people with limited English ability is hardly a rounding error. That is roughly the population of Texas just a few years ago.

Spanish is by far the largest non-English language. About 44.9 million people spoke Spanish at home in 2024, and approximately 18.4 million of them reported speaking English less than very well.

The numbers are less dramatic than some people make them sound, but they are hardly meaningless. America is not some linguistic Tower of Babel where nobody understands anybody. It also contains tens of millions of people who cannot use the country’s common language proficiently.

English and the Economic Ladder

There is another reason to encourage English that has nothing to do with making native-born Americans comfortable. It helps immigrants themselves.

Nearly 91 percent of Asian immigrants say speaking English is necessary to get ahead in the United States. Apparently they understand something parts of our political class find difficult to grasp.

If you speak Spanish, that is useful. If you speak Spanish and English, it is more useful.

Your potential employers, customers, coworkers, schools, business relationships and professional networks are no longer largely confined to one linguistic community. The same principle applies to Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese or almost anything else.

Bilingualism is an advantage. English deficiency is the handicap.

The economic numbers are consistent with it. A Brookings analysis found lower earnings among limited-English workers at every education level it examined. Among full-time, year-round workers, English-proficient workers had median earnings 39 percent higher than workers with limited English proficiency overall. Even among workers holding bachelor’s degrees, the gap was about 30 percent.

More recent survey data point in the same direction. KFF found that 55 percent of immigrants with limited English proficiency had household incomes below $40,000, compared with 28 percent of English-proficient immigrants.

English alone obviously does not cause that entire difference. Occupation, education, experience, immigration history and plenty of other things affect income too. Still, the relationship keeps showing up.

Spanish-speaking populations also remain disproportionately represented lower on the American economic ladder. In the 2024 ACS, roughly 14.5 percent of adults who spoke Spanish at home were below the poverty line, compared with about 10.6 percent of adults who spoke only English at home.

Spanish obviously does not cause poverty. Education, immigration history, occupation, family structure, age and English ability are tangled together in those numbers. There are rich Spanish speakers and poor English speakers.

Pretending language has nothing to do with economic mobility would be equally silly.

Spanish can connect you to a community. English connects you to the country.

I know something about that from personal experience.

I Was the Immigrant Once

After I got out of the Army, I stayed in Germany for a few years.

I already had the same place I had been living in while I was in the Army, so housing was taken care of. What I needed was a job, and I had a pretty short window to get one.

Before joining the Army, I had worked in printing and was pretty good at it. I knew there was a print shop in the small town where I lived, so I figured I would go talk to the owner.

There was one slight problem: I didn’t speak much German.

I understood a lot more than I could speak, which anybody who has seriously tried learning another language will understand. Hearing something, translating it in your head and figuring out what somebody means is one skill. Building the response fast enough to spit it back out in another language is something completely different.

My girlfriend at the time was German. She spoke only German to me and I spoke only English to her. And basically, this worked. We knew enough about each other that we usually knew what the other person would understand. When things completely went off the rails, we had one of those little pocket translators.

No Google Translate. No smartphone. Just a little electronic device and two people probably sounding like idiots to anyone listening.

So I went to the print shop and talked to the owner. We struggled through the conversation with my lousy German, gestures and the pocket translator until he finally got to the obvious problem: How can I hire you? You don’t even speak German.

Fair enough.

I told him printing wasn’t rocket science. I knew how to do the work. I could follow basic instructions, and I promised him I would learn German. Nobody in the shop spoke English. Not even him.

He told me to go down to the employment office in town and see what could be worked out. And by the way, at least in my experience back then, Germans didn’t screw around with something called an “Unemployment Office.” It was the Employment Office. You went there to get employed.

Imagine that. LOL.

Fortunately, the woman I dealt with spoke English. Even better, she loved Americans and really loved California.

American from California? I checked all the boxes.

She explained that even though I had just gotten out of the Army and my situation was a little unusual, I could apparently qualify under an immigrant employment program. The government could cover half of my wages for a period of time while I got established.

She gave me the paperwork and told me to take the idea back to the print-shop owner. I did, and he hired me.

That is when my real German education started.

For those first months, nobody at work spoke English. My girlfriend spoke German. Television was German, and we had three channels. My coworkers talked to each other in German all day. There was nowhere to hide, and at first it sucked.

I was lonely. A little depressed. In a weird way, I sometimes felt like a prisoner. It probably sounds dramatic unless you’ve lived it.

Imagine being a grown man who has spent his entire life making his own decisions and suddenly needing somebody else’s help to understand the world around him.

What does this letter say? Where am I supposed to go? What did that guy just tell me? What am I agreeing to? Is this apartment any good? What are these people laughing about? What did the government just send me?

You are not physically trapped, but there is always somebody standing between you and part of reality. That wears on you.

As my German got better, something changed. I felt better.

Not just because ordering dinner became easier. I could joke with my coworkers. I could argue with people. I could understand what everybody was laughing about. I could deal with problems myself and ask questions without rehearsing the sentence in my head for five minutes.

Eventually I could ramble in German the same way I ramble in the videos I post now.

Poor Germans.

The depression faded. Bavaria stopped feeling like somewhere I happened to be stuck and started feeling like a place where I could actually participate in life. I never did get my own lederhosen, but I was immersed in the society around me, and Bavaria was a hell of a place to live.

Learning German did not make me less American. It made me less helpless.

There was another reason I learned German so quickly: I really did not have much choice.

At least where I lived at the time, the ATM wasn’t offering me an English option. The people inside the bank didn’t speak English. Neither did the people I dealt with at the doctor, dentist, grocery store, hardware store or veterinarian. My coworkers didn’t speak English. My girlfriend didn’t speak English to me. Turn on the television and, congratulations, more German.

Nobody passed a law ordering me to learn the language. Germany didn’t need to. If I wanted to function on my own, I had to learn, so I did.

Within roughly six months to a year, I could speak enough German to handle my own life. Would I have learned that quickly if every ATM offered English, every government form came translated, every office had an interpreter available and I could conduct most of my daily life inside an English-speaking community? Probably not. Why would I?

People respond to incentives, including incentives nobody consciously designed. Germany gave me an enormous incentive to learn German simply by conducting ordinary German life in German.

I think America increasingly gets that backward. We tell immigrants that learning English is important while simultaneously building more ways for them to function without it.

Some of those accommodations are helpful. Some are humane. I am not suggesting we let somebody bleed out in an emergency room until he learns the difference between an adjective and an adverb. But every accommodation also makes English a little less necessary.

There is a huge difference between learning enough of the language to function on your own in six or twelve months and spending six or twelve years relying on other people to bridge the gap.

That experience is probably one reason I have so little patience for the idea that expecting immigrants to learn English is somehow cruel. I think the opposite can be cruel.

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Dependency Is Not Compassion

Last year I wrote an essay called Press 2 for Enslavement: Why the Democrat Party Prefers You Never Learn English.

The title was intentionally brutal. The argument underneath it was more basic.

If you cannot independently understand the language being used around you, somebody has to stand between you and the information. Maybe it is a translator, nonprofit worker, government employee, family member, community activist, political organizer, or simply an acquaintance.

My argument was that those intermediaries can become gatekeepers and permanent language dependency can become politically useful. The essay focused heavily on Los Angeles, where I looked at translation spending, government language programs, community organizations and voter outreach.

I am not going to rehash that essay here, but one idea from it belongs in this discussion:

Are we measuring how many people we help, or how many eventually stop needing our help?

In the Los Angeles programs I examined, public reporting emphasized things such as enrollments, workshops, materials distributed and people served. Those are easy numbers to collect and they sound impressive. What was harder to find was equally prominent reporting showing how many people became proficient enough in English that they no longer needed the service.

Suppose a program serves 50,000 people this year and 100,000 people ten years from now. The organization can say it doubled the number of people it helped. Someone else might wonder why twice as many people still need help.

Which interpretation is correct depends largely on what the program was supposed to accomplish.

Helping someone communicate with an ER doctor is obviously useful. So is helping a crime victim talk to police or helping somebody who arrived six months ago understand government paperwork while learning English.

But if someone can live in America for twenty years without acquiring enough English to navigate ordinary American life on his own, I am not convinced that adding another translator is necessarily kindness.

Translation should be a bridge to English, not an alternative to it.

My old essay opened with another line:

“Whoever controls your language, controls you.”

“Controls” may be too absolute in some circumstances, but the basic principle is difficult to escape. The less information you can obtain firsthand, the more power you surrender to whoever interprets it for you. I know what that feels like because I lived it.

The Good News Nobody Should Hide

There is one rather large problem with claiming immigrants simply refuse to learn English: the evidence says otherwise. Their English generally improves, and their children’s English improves even more.

Pew’s analysis of 2024 data found that 71 percent of Latinos age five and older were English proficient, up from 59 percent in 2000. The share speaking Spanish at home also declined from 78 percent to 68 percent over that period.

Census data make the generational difference even clearer. In 2024, roughly 91 percent of U.S.-born Hispanics were English proficient, compared with about 36 percent of foreign-born Hispanics.

Everyday behavior moves the same direction. Pew found that 73 percent of second-generation Hispanics got their news mainly in English. By the third generation or higher, it was 92 percent. Only 1 percent of that latter group said they mainly got their news in Spanish.

Asian immigration shows substantial English acquisition too. Pew reports that 84 percent of Indians age five and older are English proficient, including 79 percent of Indian immigrants and 96 percent of U.S.-born Indians.

There is broader evidence as well. A major 2024 study by economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan found that modern immigrants and their children continue to assimilate economically and culturally at rates comparable in many respects with earlier immigrant waves.

Good. If the evidence complicates my argument, then my argument needs to get better.

Yes, assimilation still often works, but “often” matters.

Generational statistics tell us what tends to happen across large populations. They do not tell us that every immigrant learns English, how long each person takes or whether the process could happen much faster under different conditions.

If English overwhelmingly wins by the third generation, that is good news. But I am also interested in what happens during the first generation. Does someone learn enough English to handle ordinary American life on his own in a year or two, or does he spend ten or twenty years relying on relatives, interpreters, government agencies and community organizations to bridge the language gap?

Those are very different experiences. My concern is not that linguistic assimilation has stopped. It hasn’t. My concern is that we have built a system that may make it work more slowly than it needs to.

The goal should not merely be that an immigrant’s grandchildren eventually speak English. We should want the immigrant himself to reach that point much sooner.

Several things have changed since earlier waves of immigration, and not all of them push in that direction.

Distance Used to Do Some of the Work

I touched on this in BORDERS.

Picture an Italian immigrant arriving in New York in 1900. His mother is in Italy. His cousins are in Italy. His old friends are in Italy. The newspaper from his hometown is in Italy. Italian radio does not exist yet. Italian television does not exist. WhatsApp, FaceTime and YouTube are a century away.

Maybe he writes letters. Maybe he eventually travels home. But most days, America is in his face.

His employer speaks English. His children’s school uses English. Government operates in English. Businesses operate mostly in English. His kids hear English everywhere, and his grandchildren hear even more.

Distance helped sever the immigrant from the daily life of the place he left. It did some of the work of assimilation.

Now imagine an immigrant living in Texas in 2026.

He can wake up and read news from India before getting out of bed. He can spend lunch scrolling social media populated mainly by people from India. He can FaceTime relatives every night, watch Indian television, listen to Indian podcasts, follow Indian politics, join dozens of WhatsApp groups and fly back home in about a day.

A Mexican immigrant can maintain even tighter physical connections because Mexico is next door.

None of this is wrong. If I lived overseas again, I would probably be doing much of the same thing. The difference is technological.

Immigration still moves the body. Technology can leave much more of the mind behind.

Distance used to do some of the work of assimilation. It does much less of that now.

It does not stop people from learning English. It can make the home language easier to preserve and the larger American society somewhat less unavoidable.

When an Enclave Becomes a World

The other change is scale.

Ethnic neighborhoods are nothing new. Little Italy was real. Chinatown was real. Germans clustered together. Poles clustered together. Jews clustered together. New immigrants understandably move near relatives, friends, churches, employers and businesses they already know.

But size can change how an enclave functions.

If a linguistic community becomes large enough, you may be able to find a doctor who speaks your language, hire a lawyer from your community, buy groceries from your homeland, find an employer inside the community, use a realtor from the community, attend a religious institution serving the community and socialize almost entirely within that network.

English becomes less urgent, and this is no longer limited to New York, Miami or Los Angeles.

The Census Bureau reports that 26.5 percent of Cedar Park residents age five and older speak a language other than English at home. Right next door in Leander, the figure is 28.4 percent.

That does not mean one-quarter of Cedar Park or Leander cannot speak English. Many probably speak it perfectly. Some were born here. It does show how quickly linguistic diversity has become normal in American suburbs that were nowhere near the country’s traditional immigration gateways a generation ago.

Spanish presents the largest test because no other foreign language in modern America has anything close to its scale.

Nearly 45 million people speak Spanish at home. Mexico sits directly across the border. Immigration from Latin America continually brings new Spanish speakers. Spanish television, radio, websites, businesses and advertising markets are large enough that someone can function extensively in Spanish for years.

And yet Spanish still tends to lose ground to English by later generations. To me, that is where the real issue starts.

Researchers Rubén Rumbaut and Douglas Massey found that when mass European immigration slowed, languages such as German, Italian, Polish and Yiddish declined across subsequent generations. Their research also found that modern immigrant languages usually weaken sharply across generations, including Spanish.

That leaves two forces pulling in opposite directions. Generational assimilation pushes toward English. Continuing immigration replenishes the language population from the other direction.

There is no magic percentage at which an ethnic neighborhood stops functioning as a landing place and becomes something closer to a parallel society. But there is no reason we should be afraid to ask when that can happen either.

India Complicates My Argument

India creates another problem for anyone who wants to turn this into a simple “foreigners won’t learn English” essay.

Indians often arrive already speaking it.

Pew found that 64 percent of Asian immigrants overall said they could read or speak English before moving to America, and Indian and Filipino immigrants were the only major Asian groups in which a large majority reported having those skills before immigration.

Among Indians living in America today, about 84 percent are English proficient, including 79 percent of Indian immigrants and 96 percent of those born here.

So if learning English were the entire assimilation problem, Indians would have solved a large part of it before their plane landed.

But imagine an immigrant who speaks flawless English, earns $180,000 a year, has an American graduate degree and works for an American technology company. He may be completely assimilated.

Or maybe most of his social life remains inside his ethnic community. Maybe he follows the politics of the country he came from intensely. Maybe nearly all his close friends share his background or his family strongly prefers marriage within the group.

I am not saying that describes Indian immigrants generally. It would be silly to infer those things from somebody’s nationality. My point is narrower than that.

Speaking English and becoming American are not necessarily the same thing.

English gets people into the same conversation. It cannot determine what they believe once the conversation begins. That belongs to Savage’s third word.

Learning English Is Not Cultural Erasure

There is an objection to all of this that I understand. Why should immigrants have to give up who they are?

They shouldn’t.

Learning German did not require me to stop being American. I still liked American music. I still thought like an American. I still had an American accent and missed American food.

German didn’t erase any of that. It gave me access to Germany.

Had I moved there permanently and spent twenty years demanding that Germans conduct my life in English, most Germans would probably have thought I was an asshole. They would have been right.

If you choose to build your life inside another society, learning enough of its language to function independently seems like one of the most basic responsibilities imaginable.

Asking immigrants to learn English is not asking them to forget where they came from. It is asking them to participate fully in the country they chose.

There is another part of that bargain Americans have become strangely reluctant to say out loud. Immigration is a choice.

If you choose to leave Mexico, India, Somalia, China or anywhere else and build your life in the United States, you are coming here for a reason. America offers access to one of the largest economies in the world, American schools and universities, American infrastructure, American courts and legal protections, American labor markets, American capital and, for those who eventually qualify, American citizenship.

That cannot reasonably be a one-way transaction.

If your goal is to come here, recreate a mini-India, mini-Mexico or mini-whatever, speak only your old language, live almost entirely inside your old community and make no serious effort to become part of the country around you, then I have a pretty basic question: Why immigrate here in the first place?

America should not be treated merely as an economic platform where somebody collects the advantages while regarding assimilation as an unreasonable burden.

Nobody is asking immigrants to burn the family photographs, stop eating the food they grew up with or pretend their grandparents never existed. Keep the language at home. Keep the recipes. Keep the family stories. Keep the traditions that fit comfortably within American law and liberty.

But there ought to be some movement in both directions. America welcomes you in. You make an effort to become American. That seems like a pretty good deal.

If you want everything America offers but want nothing to do with becoming part of America, maybe America was the wrong place to immigrate to.

America already recognizes part of this principle in citizenship law. Most applicants for naturalization must demonstrate an ability to speak, read and write basic English in addition to passing the civics requirement. USCIS provides exceptions, including the long-standing 50/20 and 55/15 rules for older permanent residents who have lived here for many years, along with disability-related exceptions. Applicants age 65 or older who have been permanent residents for at least 20 years also receive special consideration on the civics portion.

So America already accepts the basic idea. The real argument is over how seriously we take it.

The Language of Citizenship

Citizenship should eventually turn strangers into countrymen. That is much bigger than changing the document in your wallet.

Citizens vote, sit on juries, argue over laws, fund governments, decide what schools teach and determine what kind of country the next generation inherits.

In the Census Bureau’s most recent published Section 203 determinations, 331 jurisdictions were required to provide election-language assistance for qualifying language-minority populations. Those jurisdictions contained a covered voting-age citizen population of more than 24 million people. That does not mean all 24 million personally needed translation. It describes the voting-age population within the covered jurisdictions.

I understand why those rules exist. A citizen’s vote is important.

But if someone has lived in America long enough to become an American citizen, shouldn’t we also want him to reach the point where he can evaluate political arguments without another person translating them?

Not because he owes English speakers a favor, but because independence is better.

Once I learned German, I did not need somebody constantly standing between me and the information around me. I could listen, read, argue and decide for myself.

For a country as racially, ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse as the United States, a shared language is one of the few things capable of crossing almost every dividing line.

A black mechanic in Detroit and an Indian programmer in Austin may have completely different backgrounds. If they both speak English, they can at least talk. That sounds like a small thing until they cannot.

Michael Savage’s second word was Language, singular. Not because every other language should disappear, but because a country this diverse needs some mechanism through which diversity becomes a society rather than merely a collection of groups occupying the same piece of land.

And even that is not enough.

Imagine tomorrow morning that every person in America wakes up speaking flawless English. Would our arguments over assimilation disappear?

Of course not.

We could understand every word coming out of one another’s mouths and still disagree completely about free speech, religious authority, women, marriage, race, individual liberty, law, loyalty, family, citizenship and what America itself is supposed to be.

Learning German allowed me to understand the people around me. It did not make me German.

That may be the simplest way to understand why Savage needed a third word.

Borders determine who comes in. Language allows us to speak to one another. But speaking the same language does not guarantee that we believe in the same things.

That brings us to the third word.

Culture.

Coming next: Borders, Language, and Culture: CULTURE

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A country can lose control of immigration without anyone ever climbing a fence.

Before getting into any of this, Michael Savage deserves a shoutout.

Savage was talking about immigration, national identity and assimilation long before those subjects became the center of American politics. When he created the Paul Revere Society in 1994, he needed a simple way to describe what he believed defined a nation.

He came up with three words: Borders. Language. Culture.

That was 32 years ago.

What interests me now is not whether the phrase still makes a good bumper sticker. It is whether Savage was right.

I think he was.

So rather than jam all three subjects into one enormous essay and race through them, I am going to take them one at a time. This first one is about Borders. The next will deal with Language. The third will deal with Culture, which may ultimately be the most important of the three.

The first thing we have to do is stop thinking of a border as simply a fence. A border is really a decision. It is the right of the people already living in a country to decide who may enter, how many may enter, why they may enter, how long they may remain and under what conditions temporary admission can eventually become permanent membership.

Once you look at it that way, the Mexican border is only one part of the story.

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A Border Is More Than a Fence

When Savage coined his phrase in 1994, about 8.7 percent of the U.S. population was foreign-born. The Census Bureau described that as nearly one out of every eleven Americans.

By 2024, the foreign-born population had reached 50.2 million people, or 14.8 percent of the country. That is the largest foreign-born population in American history in absolute numbers, and the percentage matched the historical peak reached in 1890.

In other words, the foreign-born share of America is roughly 70 percent higher than it was when Savage started talking about Borders, Language and Culture.

That number does not, by itself, tell us whether immigration is good or bad. Numbers need context, and America has experienced mass immigration before. This isn’t America’s first immigration wave. Not even close. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, enormous numbers of Italians, Germans, Irish, Jews, Poles and others came here.

But saying, “We’ve had immigration before,” does not end the discussion any more than saying, “We’ve had debt before,” tells you whether today’s debt is a problem.

The scale is different. The speed is different. Where people come from has changed, along with the circumstances under which they arrive. Technology has changed everything too.

The immigrant arriving in New York in 1900 could not FaceTime relatives every night, watch television from his homeland, read his hometown newspaper online, fly home relatively cheaply, join hundreds of WhatsApp groups, use instant translation or spend his entire day inside an online social network populated largely by people from the country he left.

Distance used to do some of the work of assimilation. It does much less of that now.

We’ll come back to that when we get to Language and Culture. For Borders, the first question is simpler: How are people getting here?

The Border Everyone Sees

The southern border gets most of the attention for an obvious reason. At its peak, the numbers were enormous.

In May 2024, U.S. Border Patrol recorded more than 117,900 encounters between ports of entry along the southwest border. These were encounters, not necessarily 117,900 unique people, and an encounter does not automatically mean somebody was admitted permanently.

Then something else happened that deserves just as much attention.

After the Biden administration tightened asylum eligibility for many people crossing irregularly in June 2024, Border Patrol encounters between ports of entry fell 29 percent in a single month, to 83,536.

Then came a much larger decline after the Trump administration imposed substantially tougher border policies in 2025.

Whatever else people want to argue about, the numbers make one thing pretty hard to deny:

Government policy affects immigration.

That sounds ridiculously obvious, but for years Americans were regularly told by Democrats that the border was some uncontrollable force of nature. People were coming, Congress was broken, nothing much could be done.

Apparently quite a bit could be done.

The real question was whether the government wanted to do it.

Still, conservatives make a mistake when they allow the entire immigration argument to end at the Rio Grande.

Suppose tomorrow morning we somehow eliminated every illegal crossing between Brownsville and San Diego. Would American immigration suddenly become small?

Not even close.

We could put soldiers shoulder to shoulder along the Mexican border and still admit enormous numbers of people without one of them ever crawling through brush or crossing a river.

They would simply come through the front door.

The Border You Never See

Some people come as tourists. Some arrive as foreign students. Others receive employment visas, refugee status, asylum, family-sponsored green cards or other legal classifications. Some enter legally and overstay. Some begin in one status, move into another and eventually become permanent residents.

This is where immigration gets confusing because government statistics usually count programs, while normal people experience population.

You hear 85,000 H-1Bs. You hear 363,000 Indian students. You hear green-card numbers, refugee numbers, asylum numbers, temporary-worker numbers and illegal-border numbers.

They sound like separate piles.

They are not always separate people.

One person can move through several categories over ten or fifteen years, and India gives us a particularly good example of how that works because Indian immigration has grown extraordinarily fast while being heavily concentrated in education and employment channels.

About 3.2 million India-born immigrants lived in the United States in 2024, making Indians the country’s second-largest foreign-born group after Mexicans. That population grew 78 percent between 2010 and 2024. Indian immigrants are also exceptionally educated as a group. About 82 percent of Indian immigrant adults held at least a bachelor’s degree, while roughly half held an advanced degree.

Indians are not coming here at the bottom of the educational ladder. Quite the opposite.

It is partly their success at navigating America’s education and employment systems that makes the pipeline so interesting.

During the 2024-25 academic year, there were 363,019 Indian international students in the United States, making India the largest source country. Across all nationalities, OPT participation reached 294,253, and the Indian student population continued to grow even as some other major source countries declined.

OPT, or Optional Practical Training, allows eligible F-1 students to work in jobs related to their education. For qualifying STEM graduates, that work authorization can be extended further.

So the path can look something like this:

An Indian student gets admitted to an American university, arrives on an F-1 visa, earns a master’s degree and moves into OPT. If the degree qualifies, STEM OPT can extend that employment period. An employer may then sponsor the student for H-1B status, and later potentially for permanent residence.

Eventually, permanent residence can lead to citizenship, and citizenship opens additional family-immigration options.

Every step in that sequence can be perfectly legal. In fact, the system is designed to allow it.

But it raises a simple question. When somebody tells you how many “foreign students” are in America, are you looking only at students?

Or are you also looking at the front end of an employment and immigration pipeline?

Those are not quite the same thing.

One Worker Does Not Mean One Person

The H-1B program makes this even clearer.

Most Americans who know anything about H-1B have heard the number 85,000. There are 65,000 slots under the regular annual cap, plus another 20,000 for qualifying recipients with advanced degrees from American universities.

That makes it sound as though America admits 85,000 H-1B workers each year and that is pretty much the story.

It isn’t.

USCIS approved 399,378 H-1B petitions in FY2024 when initial and continuing employment petitions are combined. That does not mean 399,378 new workers entered the United States. Many approvals involved people already here, including extensions and continuing employment. It does show why the 85,000 cap should not be confused with the total size or activity of the program.

India completely dominates it.

Of those FY2024 approved petitions, 283,755 involved people born in India, or 71 percent of the total. China was a distant second at 11.7 percent.

Now look at visas issued abroad.

In FY2024, the State Department issued 150,647 H-1B visas to Indians and another 108,930 H-4 visas. H-4 is generally the dependent category for qualifying spouses and unmarried children under 21 of H-1B workers.

That works out to roughly 72 H-4 visas for every 100 Indian H-1B visas issued.

So when we hear 100 H-1B visas, the more complete picture in the Indian case is roughly 172 H-family visa issuances once spouses and children are included.

That does not mean 172 brand-new people entered America for the first time. Some had been here before, some were renewing visas, and families do not necessarily travel together.

But the larger point survives all of those qualifications.

The worker count is not the population count.

Then temporary employment can become permanent.

Once a worker obtains permanent residence and eventually becomes a citizen, another part of the immigration system opens. A citizen who is at least 21 may petition for parents, and those parents are classified as immediate relatives rather than being placed under the ordinary numerical caps that constrain some other family categories.

In FY2024 alone, the State Department issued 9,399 IR-5 immigrant visas to parents from India. Parents accounted for more than 60 percent of all immediate-relative immigrant visas issued to Indians abroad that year.

We cannot trace those 9,399 parents backward and pretend they are all the mothers and fathers of former H-1B workers. The government does not give us data that would support that claim.

But the pathway is real, and thousands of people use it.

A foreign student can become a worker. A worker can become a permanent resident. A permanent resident can become a citizen. A citizen can sponsor parents. Siblings may also be sponsored through a different, capped category, although those waits can be extremely long.

The H-1B is therefore not necessarily the end of an employment transaction. It can be one stage in a much longer immigration process.

Birthright citizenship adds another long-term dimension.

The phrase “anchor baby” tends to make people argue before they even get to the facts, so let’s start with what the law actually says.

A foreign couple does not have a child in America and magically receive green cards the next morning. A U.S.-born child cannot petition for a parent until age 21.

But the child generally becomes an American citizen at birth, and that citizenship can eventually have immigration consequences for the parents.

That question went all the way to the Supreme Court in 2026. On June 30, the Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

President Trump responded on August 6 with narrower executive orders targeting birth tourism and certain other categories, including children connected to foreign government officials and enemy aliens. The birth-tourism order also directed federal agencies to take action against people entering on nonimmigrant visas specifically for the purpose of giving birth here. Those measures were already drawing legal challenges by our August 21 cutoff.

Whatever happens with those narrower policies, the Supreme Court settled the broader question for now.

The original visa holder can be only the beginning. Spouses and children come through dependent categories, permanent residence can lead to citizenship, and citizenship opens the door to parents and other relatives. What starts as one temporary worker can eventually become a much larger permanent family presence.

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The Company You’ve Never Heard Of

The deeper I looked at H-1B, the stranger the employment side became.

Most people probably imagine the program working like this: Microsoft needs a brilliant engineer, finds one in India, sponsors him and puts him to work at Microsoft.

That certainly happens.

But another structure looks very different.

A consulting or staffing company sponsors the foreign worker. That company may have a name almost nobody outside the industry recognizes. The employee is then assigned to perform his work for another business, sometimes with additional contractors sitting between the sponsor and the ultimate client.

The result can be a worker receiving his paycheck from Company A, being sponsored by Company A and spending every day doing work for Company C.

That arrangement can be perfectly legal. It also explains why a simple question like “Who do you work for?” can sometimes produce a surprisingly complicated answer.

The structure becomes more interesting when you look at the special rules for H-1B-dependent employers.

Federal law classifies employers as H-1B-dependent at certain concentrations of H-1B employees and subjects them to additional obligations involving American-worker recruitment and displacement. But many of those additional requirements do not apply when the foreign worker qualifies as an “exempt” H-1B worker.

A worker can qualify as exempt by having a relevant master’s degree or higher, or by earning at least $60,000 a year.

Here is the part that jumped out at me.

Congress set that $60,000 threshold in 1998. It has never been adjusted.

Think about that.

A salary Congress considered sufficient to identify a highly compensated foreign professional during the Clinton administration still serves as the threshold nearly three decades later.

Sixty thousand dollars may be a perfectly respectable salary depending on the occupation and location. It is hardly an extraordinary technology salary in much of America in 2026.

Yet crossing that old threshold can help remove additional recruitment and non-displacement requirements that otherwise apply to an H-1B-dependent employer.

Maybe Congress still thinks that makes sense.

If so, somebody should explain why.

The system gets uglier when the underlying job is not real.

Federal prosecutors have repeatedly brought cases involving staffing and consulting businesses accused of obtaining H-1Bs using fictitious jobs, fake client letters or other false representations so they could build a pool of workers before genuine positions were available.

The business logic is not difficult to understand. If an IT staffing company waits until a corporate client says, “I need ten programmers now,” and only then starts the immigration process, somebody else may fill the order first.

If that same company already has fifty visa-ready workers sitting in America waiting for assignments, it can respond immediately.

Now it has inventory.

The problem is that you cannot legally invent jobs in order to create that inventory.

Some people did anyway.

In one Virginia case, Raju Kosuri and Smriti Jharia pleaded guilty in a scheme involving more than 900 immigration benefits, primarily H-1Bs. Kosuri agreed to forfeit more than $20 million in proceeds. Other federal cases have documented variations of the same basic benching and fictitious-employment problem.

How common is it?

Nobody knows. That’s part of the problem.

The best-known random USCIS assessment examined 246 H-1B petitions filed in 2005 and 2006. It found fraud in 13.4 percent and technical violations in another 7.3 percent. Problems included document fraud and deliberate misstatements involving work locations, wages and duties.

That study is twenty years old, so I’m not saying 13.4 percent is today’s number.

What it does establish is that H-1B fraud was not imaginary, and the financial incentives for abusing a system like this are not hard to understand.

Which brings me to one of my favorite rules of thumb. A friend of mine who reads this Substack said this to me almost 20 years ago.

If it doesn’t make sense, it makes money.

If It Doesn’t Make Sense, It Makes Money

Follow the immigration pipeline and a lot of people get paid.

Universities collect international tuition. Recruiters and immigration attorneys make money helping people through the process. Staffing and consulting companies make money placing workers. Corporate clients get labor. Foreign workers gain access to American salaries and, potentially, permanent residence.

There is nothing automatically sinister about any of that. Markets are full of people making money by providing legitimate services.

There is a lot of money riding on this pipeline, and people tend to fight pretty hard for things that make them money.

In 2024-25, American colleges and universities hosted nearly 1.2 million international students, including those 363,019 from India. OPT participation was also at a record level. Universities openly cite the financial contributions of international students when explaining why they want those students on campus.

Then the student becomes a worker, and a different set of financial interests enters the picture.

One organization I had never heard of before researching this was ITServe Alliance, a trade association for IT services and consulting firms.

ITServe is unusually open about what political advocacy does for its members. In its own membership material, the organization said $300 of a $1,000 membership fee went toward policy advocacy, including paying a government liaison and litigation attorney, fighting immigration reforms that it said could eliminate its consulting model, and working to pass the HIRE Act.

Nothing illegal about that. They are telling members what they are paying for.

It becomes more interesting when you follow the political strategy.

ITServe created a federal Connected PAC in 2023. The Federal Election Commission classifies it as a trade-association, lobbyist/registrant PAC.

Then read ITServe’s own December 2023 newsletter.

The organization said it identified members of the House Judiciary Committee who could influence the HIRE Act, asked chapter presidents and PAC officials to build relationships with those members and described “facilitating donations to support the cause.” The same newsletter reported that its Atlanta chapter met with Judiciary Committee member Hank Johnson and made $10,000 in donations connected with the effort, including $2,500 from the Connected PAC.

Does that prove Hank Johnson was bribed? No.

It proves an industry group identified a politician who could influence legislation important to the industry, developed a relationship with him and contributed campaign money.

That is normal Washington politics.

You can decide for yourself whether “normal Washington politics” makes you feel better.

The HIRE Act did not disappear. A new version, H.R. 6305, was introduced on November 25, 2025, by Democrat Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, joined by Democrat Reps. LaMonica McIver and Shri Thanedar. As of our August 21, 2026 cutoff, it remained at the introduced stage.

The bill would increase the regular H-1B cap from 65,000 to 130,000 and remove the current 20,000 numerical ceiling on the advanced-degree exemption. It would also change the thresholds used to determine when companies become H-1B-dependent.

There is another detail here that I almost missed.

Krishnamoorthi’s own family came to America through the student-visa pipeline. He was three months old when his father came from India to attend graduate school in Buffalo.

Shri Thanedar’s story is even more direct. He came from India in 1979 on an F-1 student visa to earn his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Akron.

One came here himself as a foreign student. The other came as an infant because his father was a foreign student. Now one is sponsoring and the other is cosponsoring legislation that would substantially expand one of the employment pipelines that can follow.

Thanedar has been pretty open about how his own experience shaped his thinking. America gave him an education and opportunities he probably would not have had otherwise, and he sees that as an argument for giving more foreign students the opportunity to stay.

I understand that. If America trains some brilliant kid from India to become a world-class engineer and then tells him to get lost so Canada can hire him, that can be pretty stupid.

But a personal success story is not an immigration policy.

Krishnamoorthi and Thanedar can look at their own lives and understandably think, Why wouldn’t we want more of this? An American software engineer competing for the same job might have a different answer.

Then there is LaMonica McIver, the third original backer of the bill.

McIver was born and raised in Newark, so she does not have the same immigrant-student story. Her connection to the immigration issue comes from another direction. She sits on the House Homeland Security Committee and has become one of the more confrontational Democrat voices on immigration enforcement.

In 2025, McIver was federally charged after a confrontation with officers outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in Newark during what she said was a congressional oversight visit. She pleaded not guilty. As of August 2026, the case was still being fought through the courts.

So look at the three original lawmakers behind this bill. Two have personal histories tied directly to the foreign-student pipeline. The third has made opposition to aggressive immigration enforcement a very visible part of her congressional record.

I’m not saying any of that is crooked. I am saying it tells you something about the people deciding how big these programs should get.

I think Washington has the whole immigration argument backward.

Universities want foreign students paying tuition. IT staffing companies want access to workers. Corporations want a larger labor pool. Immigration lawyers have clients, foreign workers want opportunities, families want relatives admitted and advocacy groups want the policies they were created to advocate for. Politicians, meanwhile, know exactly which constituencies they want to keep happy.

Everybody at the table seems to know what he wants.

The American citizen is often the only person nobody bothered to invite.

American elected officials are not members of some international customer-service department. Their first responsibility should be to the citizens who elected them.

That does not mean screwing over every foreign student or refusing to admit anyone from another country. It means the first question should not be, How can we give more people the opportunity to come here? It should be:

How does allowing more people to come here benefit the Americans who are already here?

Maybe doubling H-1B really would make America richer and stronger. Maybe keeping more foreign STEM graduates really does create enough new companies, inventions and jobs to outweigh the additional labor competition and population growth.

If so, show us.

Before doubling the program, we should know how often H-1B fills genuine shortages rather than simply providing another labor pipeline. We should know how much of it runs through third-party staffing, how often the rules are abused, what happens to the supposedly temporary population over the long run and whether American-worker protections written decades ago still make sense in 2026.

Saying “highly skilled” does not answer any of those questions. Neither does pointing to somebody who came here decades ago and became enormously successful.

That may be a wonderful American story.

It still does not tell us how many visas America should issue next year.

The Right to Say No

This brings me back to Michael Savage.

When I hear Borders, I no longer think only about somebody crawling through brush near Eagle Pass.

I think about the whole system: the airport, university, student visa, work authorization, H-1B, spouse and children, green card, family sponsorship, asylum system, consulting company, employer, lobbyist and politician.

They all connect to the same basic question.

Who gets to become part of America, and under what terms?

That is what a border ultimately represents. It is the ability to distinguish between citizens and noncitizens, visitors and residents, temporary admission and permanent settlement, legitimate applications and fraudulent ones.

Most importantly, it is the ability to say no.

There is nothing hateful about that. Every functioning country does it.

No individual has a natural right to move into the United States simply because living here would improve his life. If that were the standard, billions of people could make a perfectly rational argument for admission.

Immigration policy cannot be based solely on what is best for the immigrant.

Of course a man in India may make more money here. A family in Guatemala may be safer here. A student somewhere in Africa or Asia may get a better education here.

All of those things can be true while America still asks the question that ought to come first:

Is admitting this person in America’s interest?

A sensible immigration policy does not require shutting the country down. America can attract exceptional scientists, doctors, engineers and entrepreneurs. It can offer refuge in appropriate cases. It can allow reasonable family reunification and welcome people who genuinely want to become Americans and contribute to the country.

Immigrants have founded companies, created inventions, served in our military, raised good families and become some of the strongest believers in America precisely because they know what life somewhere else can look like.

The issue is not whether immigration can be good. Of course it can.

The issue is whether more immigration is automatically better, whether temporary programs should so easily feed permanent settlement, and whether Americans are still allowed to decide when enough is enough.

For decades, we have concentrated much of the immigration debate on people crossing illegally through the desert while a vast administrative immigration system has been operating in plain sight.

Students become workers. Workers become permanent residents. Permanent residents become citizens. Citizens can sponsor relatives. Universities make money educating people entering the pipeline. Staffing companies make money moving labor through it. Industry groups lobby to expand it. Politicians receive campaign support from people with a direct interest in its future.

Some of that is perfectly legitimate.

Some of it has been criminal.

All of it affects the composition of the United States.

That is why a border cannot merely be a wall. It has to be a functioning national policy through which Americans retain control over who enters their country, in what numbers, for what reasons and with what long-term consequences.

Michael Savage understood that 32 years ago.

But getting into America is only the first part of his warning. Once tens of millions of people from virtually every country on Earth are living inside the same borders, another question becomes unavoidable:

Can we still understand one another?

That brings us to Savage’s second word.

Language.

Coming next: Borders, Language, and Culture: LANGUAGE

Help Keep This Work Independent

Borders. Language. Culture. is going to take three essays to work through because none of these subjects can be reduced to a slogan.

For Borders, that meant digging through visa categories, immigration statistics, government reports, fraud cases, lobbying records, legislation and the money flowing through the system. Language and Culture are next.

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“People clearly still want the lawn mowed. Increasingly, they just seem to believe somebody else should pay the guy mowing it.”

Imagine waking up one Saturday morning and noticing some guy mowing your lawn. You didn’t hire him. You didn’t ask him to do it. You’re not even sure why he’s doing it, but the lawn needed mowing and, from the looks of things, he knows what he’s doing.

He finishes the lawn, edges the sidewalk, cleans up, and leaves. Nice. The following Saturday, he’s back, and then again the Saturday after that.

Before long, this becomes a regular thing. Every week this guy shows up and takes care of your yard. He doesn’t just run a mower over the grass and disappear, either. He notices things, cleans things up and sometimes does a little extra. Every once in a while, he’s out there a hell of a lot longer than you expected.

You get used to it. Maybe you even start looking forward to Saturdays because you know the yard is going to look good when he’s finished. You tell him that, too. You tell him he does great work, mention him to your wife or tell a neighbor about him. Maybe at some point you even say, “Man, I hope you never stop doing this.”

Six months go by. Then a year. Eventually, two years have passed, and the guy is still showing up while you have never paid him a dime.

At some point, wouldn’t that start to feel a little weird?

Maybe even a little like a dick?

I already know the obvious response. You never hired the guy. He volunteered. There was no contract, no agreement and no promise that you would ever pay him, so technically you don’t owe him anything. Fair enough. I’m certainly not suggesting that two years later you suddenly owe him $8,000 in back pay.

That’s not really what I’m asking.

If somebody keeps giving you something you genuinely value, week after week, and you know it takes real time and effort to produce, at what point does enjoying the benefit while leaving the entire cost to somebody else start to bother you?

Most of us understand this immediately when the work is physical because we can see it. You see the guy sweating in your yard. You see him pushing a mower around in August. You see the truck, the trailer, the gas, the equipment and the hours of his Saturday disappearing while he makes your property look better.

Writing is different because almost all of the work happens where nobody can see it. You see the essay when it lands in your inbox, but you don’t see most of what came before it.

You don’t see the research that went nowhere, the source that looked promising until I actually dug into it, the statistic I checked again because something didn’t smell right, or the outline I tore apart halfway through because I realized I was approaching the whole thing wrong. You don’t see me reading something the next morning and thinking, “Well, that sounded a hell of a lot better last night.”

Then there is editing, images, formatting, publishing, promotion, answering comments and all the other stuff that happens after the writing is supposedly finished. None of that shows up in your inbox.

You just open your email and there it is.

Freshly cut grass.

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The Internet has done something strange to our perception of work. Because essays, music, podcasts, videos, commentary and research simply appear on a screen, it becomes easy to forget that somebody had to spend part of his life making them. Somewhere along the way, “I can get this for free” became confused with “this costs nothing to produce.”

Those are two very different things.

I’ve intentionally kept my writing available to everyone because I don’t like the idea of spending two or three days researching something I believe is important and then locking it away from somebody who happens to be broke that month. I still don’t like that idea, and I don’t plan to start telling people who genuinely can’t afford a subscription that they shouldn’t be here.

But there is another side to that arrangement that I don’t think we talk about enough. If everybody wants independent work to remain free while almost nobody helps pay for it, eventually the person producing it has to absorb the difference.

For a while, that can work. You squeeze the writing around everything else, steal a few hours here and there and keep telling yourself you’ll figure it out. But eventually time and money start winning the argument.

That’s where the lawn analogy stops being hypothetical for me.

As of this week, there are 2,377 subscribers to this publication, and 216 are paid. Put another way, roughly nine out of every ten people on this list read for free.

That number by itself doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the direction things have been moving.

The audience is still growing. People are still finding the work, joining the list, opening the emails, reading the essays, sharing them, restacking them, commenting on them and sending them to friends. What has changed is the number of people deciding the work is worth financially supporting.

From January through April, 61 people became paid subscribers for the first time. From May through August 21, only 12 have. That’s roughly an 80 percent drop.

The writing didn’t stop during that period. If anything, I’ve been producing more of it. The readership didn’t suddenly disappear either. Thirty-one new people joined this publication just since August 9, yet not one of those 31 became paid.

I don’t say that because I expect every new reader to immediately pull out a credit card. Of course I don’t. People should read for a while and decide whether what I’m doing is worth anything to them.

But when the pattern stretches from weeks into months, it starts telling you something.

People clearly still want the lawn mowed. Increasingly, they just seem to believe somebody else should pay the guy mowing it.

And before any of my paid subscribers wonder whether I’m talking about them, I’m not. You are a huge part of what makes it possible for everybody else to keep reading this work for free. I know that, and I’m grateful for it.

The question is aimed more at the people who have been here for months, sometimes years, who regularly read the work and tell me they value it.

A friend of mine once illustrated this disconnect in a way I’ve never forgotten. He knew a few people who followed my work and thought highly of it, so he asked them a hypothetical question: If Chris got to the point where he simply couldn’t afford to keep writing and was about to give it up completely, would you give him $1,000 to help keep him going?

Every one of them basically said yes. Of course they would. They liked the work. They thought it was important. His response was pretty simple: Then why wait until he’s about to quit?

As far as I know, none of them ever became paid subscribers or donated anything.

I don’t tell that story because I think anybody owes me $1,000. They don’t, and the amount isn’t really the interesting part anyway. What stuck with me was that the work apparently became worth $1,000 the moment they imagined losing it, but while it was still showing up regularly, there was no urgency to support it at all.

That seems to be a very human habit. We rally around the restaurant after it announces it might close. We suddenly find money for things when the alternative becomes watching them disappear. Until then, most of us assume somebody else probably has it covered.

That’s especially easy with something on the Internet because nobody can see what is happening behind the screen. You assume there are subscribers, donors, advertisers, clients or somebody else keeping the whole thing afloat. Most of the time, you have no idea whether that’s actually true.

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I’ve had to think about this more seriously over the past month because I lost both of my remaining SEO clients. Roughly $3,000 a month in recurring income disappeared.

That isn’t anybody else’s problem, and I’m not pretending that it is. I can replace the income. I can drive more Uber, find more clients or eventually take a regular job if that’s what I have to do. I’m not above any of those things, and I’m certainly not asking anybody to rescue me from having to work.

The problem is that writing is work too.

Research takes time. Thinking takes time. Writing takes time. If I have to spend another 30 or 40 hours every week somewhere else replacing the income I lost, those hours have to come from somewhere. There isn’t a secret eighth day of the week where I can squeeze all of this in.

Eventually, the writing takes the hit. Maybe I publish less often. Maybe some of the longer pieces I spend days researching become impossible to justify. Maybe I write only when I can find a few leftover hours between everything else.

Or maybe, at some point, the guy just stops showing up on Saturday.

That’s the part I would rather talk about before it happens than afterward. I don’t want people telling me later that they wish I had kept writing or that they would have helped if they had realized how difficult it had become to keep everything going.

I’m telling you now.

If you don’t particularly care about my work, don’t pay for it. I’m serious. Keep the money. If you’re struggling financially, keep reading. Share an essay, send it to somebody else or help however you can. There are plenty of ways to support what I’m doing that don’t involve pulling out a credit card.

But if you’ve been reading me for a year or two, regularly opening these emails, sharing the essays and telling people this work matters, I think it’s fair to ask one uncomfortable question:

At what point should that belief show up somewhere other than the comments?

Nobody owes me a subscription because they read something I wrote. That’s not the argument.

But if somebody mowed your lawn every week for two years, you loved what he did, constantly told him how much you appreciated him and genuinely hoped he would keep coming back, wouldn’t you eventually feel a little strange about never giving him anything?

I think I would.

And to those of you who have stepped up, subscribed, donated, shared the work and helped keep this going, I hope you know how much I appreciate it. You are the reason I’ve been able to keep showing up on Saturdays.

If You Want the Lawn Mowed Next Saturday

If you’ve made it this far, you already know what I’m asking.

I want to keep researching, writing and publishing this work, and I want to keep making it available to everyone. Financial support from readers is what makes that possible.

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If you read regularly and want me to keep showing up, becoming a paid subscriber is the simplest way to help. It gives me more time to research, write and produce the work instead of spending those hours somewhere else trying to replace the income.

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Resistance Core is for the small number of readers who want to make a much larger commitment to what I’m building.

It is $1,200 per year, charged annually, and that support goes beyond simply keeping the current essays coming. It helps me grow this into something bigger: more content, more video, better promotion, the upcoming book An Inconvenient Black Truth, and eventually reaching far more people than I can reach today.

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If you can’t give, keep reading. Restack the essay, share it, forward it to somebody who might appreciate it or post it somewhere new people might find it. There are plenty of ways to help keep the mower running that don’t require spending money.

And to everyone who already has stepped up, whether through a paid subscription, Resistance Core, a donation or simply helping spread the work, thank you.

Coming next: Be on the lookout tomorrow or Sunday for my next essay, “Borders. Language. Culture.” If you’re anywhere near my age, you’ll probably recognize where I’m going with that title. Cue the Metallica.

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“Their politics is news. Yours is discrimination.”

At 2:15 Saturday afternoon, August 15, I decided to stop wondering whether Nextdoor was politically biased and run a little experiment. Nothing elaborate. No fake account, no undercover operation, and no attempt to bait the moderators into doing something stupid. I simply posted one of my existing essays.

The article was One Little, Two Little, Three Million Indians, a heavily researched piece about Indian immigration, H-1B visas, foreign students, assimilation, ethnic clustering, and the extraordinary growth of the Indian population in the United States. It is also partly about where I live.

I am in the Cedar Park and Leander area north of Austin, where Indian immigration is hardly theoretical. You can see the demographic change in neighborhoods, schools, stores, restaurants, professional networks, housing patterns, and even the growing popularity of cricket. The essay contains an entire section titled “From the Bay Area to Central Texas,” comparing patterns I watched while growing up in California with what I now see around me in Texas.

So when I shared it on Nextdoor, I kept the introduction deliberately dull: “I wrote about immigration and some of the demographic changes I’ve watched firsthand here in Cedar Park and Leander.”

That was all I wrote. I did not mention Republicans or the Democrat Party. I did not accuse Nextdoor of censoring conservatives. I did not insult Indians. I did not even make a political argument in the Nextdoor post itself. I linked to an existing article and explained why I thought it was relevant to the area.

Within roughly two hours, Nextdoor hid it. Curiously, the reason was not “national politics,” which would at least have fit the subject matter. Nextdoor classified the post as Discrimination.

For anyone who has never used Nextdoor, imagine Facebook after it joined an HOA. The app connects people according to where they actually live, and much of the feed is exactly what you would expect from a neighborhood bulletin board: lost dogs, suspicious cars, garage sales, recommendations for roofers, complaints about teenagers, questions about garbage collection, and the occasional person wondering why six police cars just flew down the street.

At its best, Nextdoor is genuinely useful. It is also enormous. As of August 2026, Nextdoor says it has 110 million verified neighbors across 350,000 neighborhoods, reaches one in three U.S. households, and includes more than 4,000 local news publications.

Nextdoor has also been changing what those neighbors actually see. The company describes a product transformation that expanded the app beyond neighbor-generated posts into a broader feed containing news, alerts, and other locally relevant information. In its 2025 Transparency Report, released in March 2026, Nextdoor said publisher articles represented about 7 percent of items in neighbors’ feeds. That works out to roughly one out of every fourteen items.

The publisher operation is substantial. Nextdoor says 96 percent of U.S. cities on the platform have news coverage and more than 100,000 publisher articles are delivered every week. Publishers can give Nextdoor RSS feeds, which the company turns into posts containing headlines, excerpts, thumbnails, and links to the original stories. They can also create posts and polls and participate in comments and discussions.

Giving local newspapers another way to reach readers is not the problem. Local journalism has been getting crushed for years, and another source of readers might actually be a good thing. The problem is that publishers and ordinary users do not appear to play by quite the same rules.

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Politics Is Fine With the Right Badge

Nextdoor restricts political discussion, and the basic idea is not unreasonable. Local political issues belong in the neighborhood. National political warfare generally does not. Its own guidance specifically lists immigration when discussed as national policy among the subjects that belong in Groups rather than the regular neighborhood conversation.

I understand why. Most people do not join Nextdoor because they have been sitting around thinking, You know what my life needs? More arguments about Congress.

Yet politics keeps arriving anyway, often with a little label saying Local publisher.

One example that appeared in my feed came from the Austin American-Statesman. The story concerned ICE activity in Austin and Congressman Greg Casar demanding answers about federal immigration enforcement.

Casar represents the area, so the story is legitimate local news. But nobody could seriously pretend the underlying subject is apolitical. Immigration enforcement is one of the biggest national political fights in America. ICE is a federal agency. Casar is a Democrat congressman and currently chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Add the word Austin, however, and the subject becomes local news.

Nextdoor’s own Publisher Policy complicates that distinction because it says news publishers are prohibited from sharing national or non-local news. The practical result is strange. Immigration as national policy is too national for an ordinary neighborhood discussion, and national news is supposedly too national for publishers. Yet a national immigration fight becomes legitimate local content as soon as something happens in Austin.

Fair enough, if the same principle applied to everyone.

My article dealt with national immigration policy too, but it also discussed what I was seeing in Cedar Park and Leander. The Statesman used Austin as the local connection. Mine used Cedar Park and Leander.

The professional publisher entered through the front door. Mine disappeared within hours.

ICE was hardly an isolated example. A KUT story that appeared on Nextdoor concerned a giant Adirondack chair outside Violet Crown City Church in Austin. At first glance, it is exactly the kind of quirky local feature I like. Someone wondered about the enormous chair, a reporter went to investigate, and there was a fun history behind it.

Then the politics began. KUT’s own headline called the chair “often political,” and that description was accurate. Over the years, the pastor has painted it with messages promoting Pride Month, Black Lives Matter, gun reform, marriage equality, banned books, opposition to ICE, and criticism of the current administration. One design read, “We want snow, not ICE.”

The pastor explained that some of the messages respond to things the president says and told KUT that his church believed ICE tactics had become dangerous enough that it needed to respond. KUT also reported that critics had complained to the church and, on a few occasions, vandalized the chair.

KUT has every right to publish that article, just as the pastor has every right to paint whatever he wants on his enormous chair. If he wants to cover the thing in rainbows, denounce ICE across the back, and staple a picture of Bernie Sanders to the armrest, knock yourself out.

Nextdoor then takes an article whose own headline describes the subject as political and delivers it directly into the neighborhood feed. It is not sent off to some special politics group or treated as an intrusion into peaceful neighborhood discussion. It arrives as news, complete with the institutional blessing of the Local publisher label.

So politics alone clearly isn’t the problem. Who is speaking seems to change the outcome.

A Little News, a Little Politics

The Austin Chronicle gave me an even cleaner example.

One of its recent weekly news roundups contained plenty of ordinary local reporting. Burn bans, school transportation, swimming pools, fires, CapMetro service, vaccinations, Austin Energy. Exactly the sort of material a local news roundup should contain.

Mixed among those stories, however, the political framing became much more obvious.

The Chronicle reported that ICE had detained four construction workers after Texas DPS stopped a vehicle traveling the wrong way on a one-way street. DPS determined that everyone in the vehicle was in the country illegally and held them until ICE arrived. The Chronicle then highlighted Austin officials condemning ICE and DPS, including calls to “abolish and prosecute ICE.”

Another item concerned proposals to reduce polling locations. Rather than simply reporting that opponents believed the changes would make voting more difficult, the Chronicle stated in its own narration that the proposal would make it harder for residents to exercise their right to vote, then followed that statement with objections from voting-rights advocates.

A few paragraphs later came a story about the new Travis County Democrat Party chairman and the party’s hope that he could help produce a “blue November.” The roundup also directed readers to another Chronicle article carrying the wonderfully restrained title, “The Right-Wingification of the University of Texas Continues.”

Then, after everything from wildfires to school lunches, the Chronicle ended with its Quote of the Week. The chosen quote came from the Caldwell County Democrat Party chair: “Let’s call this what it is: voter suppression, plain and simple.”

Most of the roundup is ordinary local reporting. You get a burn ban, a bus route, a pool closing, ICE abolition, a fire, school lunches, voter suppression, another transit update, a “blue November,” and then back to ordinary neighborhood concerns.

Nobody has to plaster VOTE DEMOCRAT across the screen. A feed can be overwhelmingly neutral and still tilt politically if most of the political material that does appear points in one direction.

Neutral plus Left is not neutral when Right is missing.

By missing, I mean missing from what I have actually seen, not absent from every Nextdoor feed in America. I have not audited every feed in the country, and I am not saying that no conservative publication has ever been approved by Nextdoor. The network is too large for that. Nextdoor says it works with more than 4,000 publications across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

I am describing what I keep seeing in my own Central Texas feed. The political publisher content I encounter is routinely neutral or left-of-center. What I do not see is anything resembling a matching stream from the other direction.

I have not been seeing sympathetic stories about why local residents support ICE enforcement. I have not been seeing friendly features about churches fighting progressive gender ideology, or stories presenting gun-rights activists the way the KUT chair article presented gun reform, Pride, and anti-ICE activism. I have not seen a giant church display painted with TRUMP WAS RIGHT followed by a warm local feature about all the important conversations it inspires.

Perhaps those stories are there and I simply have not encountered them. If so, a larger sample should show it.

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The Neighborhood Was Handling It Just Fine

Before Nextdoor intervened, people were already reacting. There were six reactions, four of them hearts. One commenter called the article racist. Another essentially called it smart. Someone else called it bigotry.

The neighborhood, in other words, was doing something human beings used to call disagreeing. The positive reactions did not prove the essay was right, just as the accusations of racism did not prove it was wrong. People were reading an argument and reaching different conclusions. For several thousand years, adults somehow survived this experience without a smartphone application stepping between them.

Nextdoor’s first notification said the post had been hidden because it “may have broken” the discrimination guideline. That wording caught my attention because it left open the possibility that the initial decision was wrong, so I appealed.

I kept the appeal almost as boring as the original post. I did not complain about liberals or accuse Nextdoor of censorship. I simply wrote: “My article discusses immigration policy and local demographic change. It contains no slurs, threats, or calls for discrimination. Please identify the specific statement that violates Nextdoor’s discrimination guideline.”

The following day, August 16, Nextdoor returned its decision. The post was removed, and the reason remained Discrimination.

Nextdoor’s discrimination policy is broad. It bans not only slurs and threats, but also negative stereotypes, caricatures, and generalizations about protected or marginalized groups, including ethnicity, immigration status, and national origin.

My article discusses Indians collectively, including assimilation, ethnic clustering, marriage patterns, immigration, and private social circles. That gives Nextdoor a policy hook for its decision. It does not make the decision correct.

What it did not do was tell me which passages crossed that line. I specifically asked for the offending statement and never received one.

The policy says something else too. Nextdoor explicitly welcomes discussions supporting movements such as Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate, along with conversations and celebrations involving LGBTQIA+ issues. More revealing, it says disagreement over policy or tactics is acceptable, but posts or comments intended to undermine what it calls the core messages of equality are not.

That is not a neutral rule. Once Nextdoor gets to define the “core message of equality,” it also gets to decide which disagreements merely challenge policy and which ones supposedly challenge equality itself. On race, immigration, gender, sexuality, and other political fault lines, that distinction gives the company enormous room to enforce a left-wing view of what equality means while classifying competing arguments as discrimination.

Whether every moderator consciously thinks of it that way is almost beside the point. The discretion is built into the rule. Nextdoor has chosen which ideas receive an explicit presumption of legitimacy and given itself the authority to shut down arguments it believes undermine them.

It is their app. They can write the rules that way. But nobody should confuse those rules with political neutrality.

This was not my first encounter with Nextdoor moderation. I have shared roughly a dozen essays from my Substack on the platform, and every one has eventually been removed. That history is why I wanted this particular test to be so uneventful. I did not want to hand Nextdoor an easy explanation based on some inflammatory sentence added above the link. I wanted to know what would happen if I simply shared an existing article and explained its local connection. Now I had an answer.

Suppose Nextdoor Was Right

The obvious response is that Nextdoor may have been right to remove my article. Fine. Suppose it was.

Suppose a moderator read the entire essay, compared it with Nextdoor’s rules against negative group generalizations, and concluded that I crossed the line. I may disagree with that judgment, but it is not an absurd reading of the policy.

That still leaves the larger question: Why are approved media organizations allowed to distribute explicitly political advocacy into a neighborhood feed where ordinary users face much tighter restrictions on political speech?

You can despise my essay and still ask that question. In fact, the argument is stronger if it does not depend on anyone liking my writing.

Nextdoor has effectively created two classes of political speaker. A publisher begins with institutional status and access to a system designed specifically to distribute its material. Nextdoor advertises publisher accounts as a way to reach what it calls a 100 percent verified audience in relevant areas. Publishers can provide RSS feeds, track impressions and clicks, create posts and polls, and engage in comments. The ordinary neighbor gets a text box and the moderation system.

Publishers are still bound by Nextdoor’s rules, but they start from a very different position. Distribution is already built into the product. The ordinary user begins as an individual whose material can be reported, hidden, appealed, and removed.

The discrimination policy adds another layer. Black Lives Matter discussions are expressly welcomed. LGBTQIA+ celebrations are expressly welcomed. Posts judged to undermine Nextdoor’s chosen “core messages of equality” can be prohibited.

Combine that with a publisher system that, in my Central Texas feed, repeatedly supplies political stories from the left, and nobody at Nextdoor headquarters needs to write a single partisan sentence.

By the time the feed reaches me, much of the political sorting has already happened.

How National Politics Becomes Local News

Almost any national political issue can be localized.

Immigration becomes immigration in Austin. ICE becomes ICE in Austin. Trump becomes how Austin is responding to Trump. Gun control becomes an Austin church demanding gun reform. Pride becomes an Austin church celebrating Pride. Federal education policy becomes what Washington’s decisions mean for Austin schools.

The national argument has not suddenly stopped being political. Someone added a ZIP code.

Local newspapers should explain how national policy affects their communities. The trouble comes when attaching a place name changes who gets to discuss the underlying issue.

Nextdoor tells ordinary users that national political subjects, including immigration as national policy, belong in Groups. It separately tells publishers not to share national or non-local news. Yet publishers obviously can report on national political controversies when those controversies have a sufficiently local connection.

Journalistically, that makes sense. It also leaves a very convenient doorway.

An approved publisher can take a national immigration fight, connect it to Austin, and put it in my neighborhood feed. I can take the same national argument, connect it to Cedar Park and Leander, and discover that my article violates a different set of rules.

Politics is already in the neighborhood. The question is what happens to it depending on who is speaking and which side of Nextdoor’s cultural boundaries the argument lands on.

The newspaper gets to be political because Nextdoor calls it news. The neighbor gets moderated because Nextdoor calls his contribution something else.

Propaganda does not require fabrication. Facts can be accurate while the way they are selected and presented still pushes an ideological message.

Selection shapes the story. So does who gets quoted, which side gets sympathetic treatment, how often a message is repeated, and where it appears. Sometimes what never makes it into the feed tells you as much as what does.

Consider the giant chair again. Every political design KUT described could exist exactly as reported. The pastor could sincerely believe everything he said. The reporter did not need to manufacture a single fact.

Yet the story still points the reader in a clear moral direction. Pride represents inclusion. Gun reform is associated with moral concern. Anti-ICE activism becomes protection of vulnerable neighbors. Opposition appears largely through complaints and vandalism. KUT closes the political portion with a neighbor explaining how a marriage-equality design gave him an opportunity to discuss the issue with his nephew.

Now reverse the politics.

Imagine an Austin church with a giant display supporting ICE, opposing abortion, defending gun rights, criticizing transgender ideology, and praising Trump. Imagine a friendly local feature in which the pastor explains that he is standing up for people ignored by the left, followed by a father saying one of the messages helped him teach his nephew about the sanctity of unborn life.

Would Nextdoor put that story in my feed? I don’t know. If Nextdoor routinely distributes both versions, my criticism weakens. If one version keeps appearing while the other rarely does, the criticism gets stronger. What I care about is what keeps showing up in the feed, and what doesn’t.

Why This Is Different From Cable News

Political bias is easier to recognize when it looks political. Nobody turns on MSNBC or Fox News without understanding that he has entered a national political media environment. Whatever else you think of either network, the viewer knows what room he walked into.

Nextdoor feels different because its greatest asset is not journalism. It is locality.

The company describes itself as a network rooted in “real people, real locations, and real communities” and says it reaches one in three American households. Its pitch to publishers is access to verified local audiences interested in what is happening around them.

The app is built around your street, your schools, your police department, your restaurants, your neighbors, your traffic, and your missing pets. A publisher article does not arrive looking like some foreign object from the national media ecosystem. It appears beside people you may actually know and events happening a mile away.

The institutional source is not your neighbor, but it sits next to your neighbor. After enough exposure, a particular political framing can start to feel less like a media position and more like part of the local atmosphere. Nextdoor never has to announce that everyone around you agrees. Nobody is dumb enough to put up a banner saying YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD IS LIBERAL NOW.

The feed does the quieter work.

Publisher articles account for about 7 percent of feed items. Suppose thirteen items concern weather, lost pets, restaurants, road construction, and garbage pickup while the fourteenth contains ideological framing. The first thirteen do not magically neutralize the fourteenth.

If anything, the ordinary neighborhood material may make the political piece easier to absorb because you did not open the app expecting an argument. You wanted to know why the power was out. Five minutes later, you are also being told who is suppressing voters.

Cable news at least has the decency to look like cable news.

The Better Test Is to Count

After my post disappeared, I ran across another local Nextdoor user’s post. His graphic said NEXTDOOR IS A BIASED LIBERAL PLATFORM and CENSORSHIP. The comments on his post had been closed.

I laughed when I saw it, but it does not prove anything. I do not know what happened in his earlier discussions, whether people began attacking one another, which rules may have been cited, or why Nextdoor closed the comments. Without those details, his experience is only another anecdote, and mine is an anecdote too.

A pile of anecdotes won’t settle it. A larger sample might.

Every political or cultural publisher article that appears in my feed can be logged by publisher, date, subject, headline, and actual framing. Not the reputation of the newspaper. The article itself.

Some will be neutral. Some will lean left or center-left. Some may lean right or center-right. If conservative pieces appear, count them. If they dominate, I have to change my argument. If the numbers turn out roughly balanced, then the system is more balanced than it presently looks from my feed.

If dozens of political publisher articles appear and nearly every ideological one leans in the same direction, however, we are no longer arguing about whether I had a vague feeling that Nextdoor seemed liberal.

We counted.

One reason I want to count is simple: don’t say always or never when the evidence only supports usually or rarely. Say “never” after sampling six stories and someone only has to produce a seventh to make you look foolish.

If the political imbalance on Nextdoor is real, there is no need to exaggerate it. The evidence should eventually show it.

Yes, It Is Their App

The easiest objection is also the least interesting: Nextdoor is a private company and, yes, it is their app.

They can make rules, choose publishers, prohibit subjects, remove my article, and remove me. The First Amendment does not require Nextdoor to distribute Chris Arnell’s Substack. I have never claimed otherwise.

But “they are allowed to do it” is not an answer to “are they doing it?”

Private ownership does not make political bias vanish. It simply means the government is not responsible for the decision. If Nextdoor presents itself as a trusted neighborhood information network, users are perfectly entitled to examine how that network is constructed, who gets preferred access, which publishers appear, and whether political messages are treated differently depending on their source.

The discrimination policy makes that point clearer, not weaker. Nextdoor is openly telling users that some movements and messages fit within the kind of neighborhood conversation it wants to encourage while others may be removed if they conflict with boundaries the company has drawn.

Nothing about that is illegal, but nothing about it is neutral either.

McDonald’s is legally allowed to sell me a terrible hamburger too. I am still allowed to mention that the hamburger sucks.

For years, one of the great promises of the internet was that ordinary people would no longer need permission from a newspaper editor to publish an argument. For generations, a relatively small number of institutions controlled distribution. Editors decided what deserved attention, which voices counted as legitimate, and which opinions never reached the page.

The internet broke much of that system. Anyone could publish, and social media went even further by allowing ordinary people to reach one another directly.

Nextdoor has created an odd hybrid. The neighbors are still there, but professional media organizations have been reintroduced as a privileged class inside the neighborhood conversation. Their content can arrive automatically with institutional branding and geographic distribution built into the product, while the resident remains subject to a moderation system shaped not only by rules against hatred and threats, but by Nextdoor’s own stated ideas about which cultural messages deserve protection.

In my case, I posted an article about immigration and demographic change in the community where I actually live. Neighbors began arguing about it. Nextdoor stopped the conversation, I appealed, and the company upheld the removal as discrimination without identifying the specific passage I had asked it to identify.

Meanwhile, publisher stories involving anti-ICE activism, Pride, gun reform, a “blue November,” voter suppression, and the “right-wingification” of the University of Texas continued to qualify as neighborhood information.

Any one of those decisions can probably be defended in isolation. Taken together, they raise a more interesting question: Did the old information gatekeeper really disappear, or did it simply get an app?

Back to the Neighborhood

Tonight, somebody will open Nextdoor because a dog got loose. Someone else will need a roofer. A woman will ask whether anybody else lost power. A man will complain that nobody knows how to use the new traffic circle. Somebody will report a suspicious teenager who turns out to live three houses away.

Then an article from a local publisher will appear. Most likely it will be completely ordinary. Maybe a restaurant opened, a school-board meeting ran late, or a road is closing. Every so often, though, the subject will be ICE, Trump, guns, Pride, voting, immigration, Republicans, or the Democrat Party.

The reader may barely notice that the source has changed. The political material is embedded in ordinary neighborhood information, carrying the same visual familiarity as the school notice, police alert, lost dog, and plumber recommendation.

Then a neighbor tries to answer. In my case, it took about two hours before Nextdoor decided the neighborhood needed protecting from the conversation.

By now, whether Nextdoor “allows politics” is the wrong question. Obviously it does. I can see it in my feed.

The better questions are who gets to publish it, what views the platform itself has decided deserve special protection, and whether the rules operate the same way when the politics runs in the opposite direction.

Propaganda does not always arrive waving a political flag. Sometimes it arrives between a missing Labrador and a recommendation for a plumber, surrounded by so much ordinary neighborhood life that eventually it stops looking like politics at all.

It just looks like the neighborhood.

Don’t Let Them Own the Microphone

If there is a larger point buried underneath all the Nextdoor nonsense, it is this: publishing something is only half the battle.

The other half is getting it in front of people.

For decades, newspapers, television networks, editors, and other institutions decided which ideas reached an audience. The internet was supposed to break that monopoly. In many ways it did. Now some of the same gatekeeping is creeping back in through algorithms, moderation systems, approved publishers, and platforms that quietly decide who gets the microphone.

I have no intention of asking their permission.

But independence only works if enough readers are willing to support it.

I want to keep growing this publication, reach far beyond the people who already agree with me, produce more content, get back into video, support my upcoming book, An Inconvenient Black Truth, and build something large enough that a moderator, algorithm, advertiser, or gatekeeper cannot decide whether an argument lives or dies.

That takes more than writing the essay.

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Paid subscribers are the foundation that keeps this independent.

Eighty dollars a year from one reader does not build much. Enough readers doing it creates the stable base that lets me spend more time researching, writing, publishing, and expanding the audience instead of constantly trying to replace the income needed to keep doing it.

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Join the Resistance Core: $1,200 per Year

Resistance Core is different.

It is not really a premium subscription tier. It is a very small group of readers who have decided they want to help build this into something much larger than one guy writing essays.

There are only five members right now. Most paid the full $1,200 annual membership and have also stepped up with additional contributions during the year.

I do not take that lightly.

Resistance Core helps create room for the next stage: more content, video, An Inconvenient Black Truth, a larger audience, and eventually an operation capable of getting these arguments in front of people who would never find them on their own.

Because that is ultimately how you get around the gatekeepers.

You build something they do not control.

Resistance Core is $1,200 per year, charged annually.

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And if money is not in the cards, there is something especially useful you can do with this particular essay.

Share it somewhere I cannot.

Restack it. Post it. Email it. Text it to somebody. Put it in front of the neighbor who thinks Nextdoor is perfectly neutral. Send it to the person who will probably disagree with half of it.

If platforms are going to decide who gets the microphone, then we have to get better at passing the microphone ourselves.

They can control their feed. They do not have to control our reach.

“Redemption isn’t becoming perfect. It is having the chance to do something worthwhile after you have failed.”

Until the recent controversy surrounding Jason Arday, I had never heard of the guy. Then suddenly his name was everywhere.

Arday was 41. In 2023, he became the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. He was autistic, reportedly did not speak until he was 11 and could not read or write until he was 18. Cambridge understandably made a big deal out of the story. Here was a Black autistic man who had supposedly overcome enormous obstacles and landed at one of the most prestigious universities on Earth.

Then the story began coming apart. Serious allegations of plagiarism emerged. Questions were raised about his academic work and parts of the extraordinary biography that had helped make him famous. Cambridge began reviewing his qualifications and how he had been appointed. Arday resigned on August 5.

I considered writing about him, and it wasn’t going to be kind.

My initial reaction was that Cambridge had found itself the perfect DEI poster child. Black, autistic, inspirational, with an almost unbelievable overcoming-the-odds story and an academic career built largely around race and inequality. Then came evidence suggesting that at least some of what Cambridge had so proudly promoted deserved much closer scrutiny.

There was plenty about the story that caught my attention. Race, DEI, institutional incompetence, questionable scholarship and one of the world's great universities standing in the middle of it all. I had plenty of material, and knowing me, I probably would have been brutal.

Then Jason Arday died today.

And suddenly the essay I had been considering didn’t seem quite so clever.

I started thinking about what I might have written, how brutal I probably would have been, and how I would feel tonight if I had published it yesterday.

What if I had spent a couple thousand words tearing this guy apart, made a few especially vicious jokes, called him a fraud and hit publish, only to wake up the next morning and discover he was dead?

I know myself well enough to know it would have haunted me.

Not because I would suddenly decide everything I had written was wrong. Death does not make plagiarism disappear. It doesn’t turn dishonesty into honesty, and it shouldn’t make legitimate questions off-limits.

But I would wonder whether he had read it. Was he already falling apart? Had something I wrote become one more thing piled on top of a guy who thought his entire life had just collapsed?

I would never know. That is exactly why I think the question would stay with me.

Police have not said Jason Arday committed suicide. His death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious, and the coroner will eventually tell us more. Maybe his death had absolutely nothing to do with the scandal surrounding him. I sincerely hope that’s the case.

Still, given the timing, suicide crossed my mind. Nine days ago he resigned from Cambridge after watching his career and reputation implode in public. Today he is dead at 41.

That possibility hits me differently because I know what it is like to reach a place where continuing doesn’t seem particularly important.

Almost a Statistic

I wrote about this before in an essay called Anti-Depression Obsession.

I was thirty years old, restless, having trouble sleeping and struggling to concentrate. I eventually ended up on antidepressants. They didn’t make me happy. They made me numb.

Food lost its taste. Laughter stopped meaning much. I was sweating constantly, foggy and increasingly detached from everything around me. One afternoon I came home from work early, sat on the floor of my closet, stripped down because I was sweating so badly, and held a loaded gun.

I wasn’t crying or angry. Mostly, I felt nothing.

Somehow, I didn’t pull the trigger. I got off the medication, went through a miserable withdrawal and continued with my life.

Nearly thirty years later, I sometimes think about that guy on the closet floor, especially lately.

Sometimes life seems useless. You look around at the things that have gone wrong, the money you don’t have, the mistakes you’ve made and the people depending on you, and you start feeling like a complete failure.

I’ve felt some of that lately. There are days when I wonder whether I have let down my wife, my kids and plenty of other people who expected something better from me.

Then I think about that gun and everything that happened because I didn’t pull the trigger.

Not because I went on to become some perfect man. Jesus Christ, no. That isn’t how redemption works.

We like redemption stories with clean endings. Somebody screws up, learns his lesson, changes his life and supposedly never fucks up again. Real life isn’t anything like that.

I’ve come through for people in some pretty important moments and managed to screw things up somewhere between many of them. Sometimes I have been exactly the guy somebody needed. Other times I have been the problem.

That’s just life.

Redemption isn’t becoming perfect. It is having the chance to do something worthwhile after you have failed.

If I had pulled that trigger at thirty, whatever version of me existed on that closet floor would have become the final version. There would have been no children raised afterward, no people helped, no businesses built, no essays written and no moments when somebody desperately needed me and, despite all my other shortcomings, I happened to come through.

Of course, there also would have been no future mistakes.

I got both. Plenty of good mixed in with plenty of fucking up.

But I got more chapters.

What If He Was a Fraud?

That is what made me start thinking differently about Arday.

Suppose the worst allegations against him eventually prove true. Suppose he really was a fraud. Does that mean his entire existence was fraudulent?

I don’t think so.

I would be amazed if Jason Arday didn’t inspire somebody. Maybe an autistic kid heard that a boy who supposedly didn’t speak until he was 11 became a Cambridge professor and started thinking differently about his own future. Maybe a Black kid who had never pictured himself anywhere near an elite university saw Arday standing at Cambridge and aimed a little higher. Or maybe some kid who was way behind in school heard that Arday supposedly learned to read and write at 18 and figured being behind didn’t mean he was finished.

If one of those people went out and conquered the world, does that accomplishment become fake because the man who provided the inspiration may have lied?

Of course not.

Flawed people can still do good things. Somebody can lie about one part of his life and still say something another person desperately needed to hear. Somebody can fail spectacularly and still inspire somebody else to succeed.

I’ve lived enough of that contradiction myself that I would be a hypocrite to pretend otherwise.

Maybe that’s one of the mistakes we make when somebody falls publicly. We learn the worst thing about him and suddenly use it to explain everything about him. A man gets caught lying and now everything he ever said was supposedly a lie. He fails and suddenly he was always a failure.

Human beings aren’t that simple.

Cambridge Still Has Some Explaining to Do

None of this lets Cambridge off the hook.

I cannot prove Cambridge knew Arday was a fraud when it hired him, so I won’t say that. What is documented is troubling enough.

Arday joined Cambridge in March 2023. Within roughly two months, senior university officials had been warned about substantial plagiarism allegations involving one of his papers. Arday agreed to take down the paper, but Cambridge continued publicly supporting him and declined to investigate the underlying work because it predated his arrival at the university.

That is absurd.

Cambridge had just hired a man partly on the strength of his academic record, then treated serious questions about that record as somebody else’s problem because the work had been done somewhere else.

If Arday’s death is eventually ruled a suicide, I will think Cambridge bears some responsibility for the circumstances that preceded it. Not because Cambridge exposed him, but because Cambridge helped build the pedestal.

It publicly celebrated the race, disability and remarkable biography that made Arday such an irresistible symbol. Then serious warning signs appeared almost immediately and the university had an opportunity to deal with them quietly, thoroughly and honestly.

Instead, the problems sat there until the eventual reckoning became enormous and public.

Sometimes protecting someone from consequences isn’t kindness. Sometimes it just gives him farther to fall.

The Guy on the Other End

But Cambridge isn’t really why I’m writing this. I keep thinking about the essay I didn’t write.

Maybe Arday never would have seen it. Maybe he would have read it and thought I was an asshole. Maybe he would have laughed at it and moved on.

Or maybe he would have been sitting alone somewhere, already thinking his reputation, career and future were gone, and my essay would have been one more stranger telling him what a worthless piece of shit he was.

I would never know.

That does not mean I am going to stop being blunt. If somebody lies, I am going to call it a lie. If an institution lowers its standards because it wants an ideological success story, I want that exposed too.

Truth doesn’t become cruelty simply because it hurts. But not every cruel thing we say becomes more truthful simply because the target has done something wrong.

There is a line there. I have probably crossed it before, and what happened today reminded me that I should at least know where it is.

Jason Arday was 41. Even if every allegation against him eventually proved true, he had time to admit it, apologize, walk away from academia and try to rebuild whatever was left.

He probably would have screwed up again. Most of us do.

Maybe somewhere between those future mistakes he would have done something great. Maybe he already had. There may already be somebody walking around today living a bigger life because Jason Arday once convinced him that he could.

That is closer to what redemption actually looks like. You don’t become a saint. You get another chance, and hopefully you do something worthwhile with at least some of it.

Thirty years ago, I was sitting on a closet floor with a loaded gun, feeling as though whatever my life had become wasn’t worth continuing.

I was wrong.

Since then I’ve done things I’m proud of and things I’m not. I’ve come through for people and I’ve failed people. There has been a lot of good mixed in with a fair amount of fucking up.

I got more chapters.

Some of them were worth sticking around for.

I don’t know what killed Jason Arday today, and I don’t know what he would have done with the rest of his life. Maybe he would have redeemed himself. Maybe he would have fucked up again. Most likely, like the rest of us, he would have done some of both.

I just wish he’d had the chance to find out.

And I’m glad the last thing I contributed to his story wasn’t an essay telling him what a piece of shit I thought he was.

There is probably something in that for all of us. Tell the truth. Hold people accountable. Expose fraud when you find it.

Just remember that the person you’re tearing apart today may still become somebody better tomorrow.

You might too.

RIP Jason Arday.